Death Penalty

On Sunday, 60 Minutes profiled Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins, who has proactively sought out and exposed the wrongful convictions of his predecessor, Wade.  In all, 18 men from Dallas County have been cleared by DNA testing; a total of 33 men have been cleared across Texas.   At a "Summit on Wrongful Convictions" in Texas on May 8, legislators, lawyers, exonerees, law enforcement officials, and even a couple of judges discussed how to deal with the inescapable fact that Texas has been getting it wrong an awful lot.   AP coverage of the summit is here, and video of the conference itself should eventually be available here.  An April 30 press conference feature Texas Senator Rodney Ellis announcing the summit is there now.

So, where to begin?

As DA Watkins pointedly remarked, "It can be argued that Texas ... may have one of the worst criminal justice systems in this country.  We have to start where we have the most problems."

Suggestions offered included:

• Mandating how lineups or photos are presented to eyewitnesses. (James Waller, who is 6 foot 4, spent 10 years in prison for a rape committed by a man the victim described as being 5 foot 8.)
• Creating an authority that would oversee crime labs the way a health department oversees restaurants.
• Setting up crime labs that are independent of police departments.
• Re-examining how appeals filed by inmates are treated. (James Woodard, for example, who spent 27 years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, was labeled an abuser of the system for filing too many appeals and requests for DNA testing.)

It's a start, but one of the biggest "wrongful convictions" problems in Texas is in fact the death penalty.  Texas criminal justice is massively and obviously flawed, and yet the Lone Star State has executed 405 people in 25 years, and has 8 more already scheduled for this year.  While 33 innocent men in Texas prisons did get DNA tests and were rightly exonerated, how many others have not been lucky enough to get tests, or did not have DNA evidence in their cases?  And how many of those are on death row now, or perhaps have already been executed?  The first step for Texans concerned about wrongful convictions should be to stop the execution conveyor belt.

Brian

DPAC

The state of Georgia has always had a special place in the history of the US death penalty.  It was Supreme Court cases out of Georgia that both halted (Furman v. Georgia, 1972) and restarted (Gregg v. Georgia, 1976) executions in the US.  In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v. Kemp, another Georgia case, that statistics demonstrating systemic racial bias could not be used to argue racial bias in a particular death penalty case. 

Now, 21 years later, the state of Georgia has been the first to resume executions since the Supreme Court ruled that lethal injection could be constitutional in Baze v. Rees (pdf). William Earl Lynd was put to death last night for the murder of his girlfriend, Ginger Moore.  But it is telling that Georgia authorities did not openly brag about this dubious achievement.  Governor Sonny Perdue told the media, "It was not something we wanted to necessarily be first at. It was just the fact that this had been there."

Perhaps this is a sign that times have changed, that displaying ghoulish enthusiasm for the death penalty is no longer seen as a smart political move.  Politicians like Governor Perdue are aware that public opinion has slipped, and that public support for alternatives to the death penalty is now as high or higher than support for executions.  And that juries are increasingly reluctant to sentence people to death - in the last two years, death sentences have been lower than at any time since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

There will be more executions this year, maybe a lot more, but there will also undoubtedly be more examples of the grave injustices our capital punishment system is known for.  Between September 25, when Texas controversially executed Michael Richard on the same day the Supreme Court agreed to hear Baze v. Rees, and last night, when Georgia executed William Earl Lynd, five men were exonerated from America's death rows.  (There have now been 129 such exonerations.)

The fundamental flaws in our death penalty continue to be exposed and the public continues to slowly turn away.  With our help, eventually politicians, legislatures and courts will get the message. 

Brian

DPAC

After 13 years on North Carolina's death row, Levon "Bo" Jones was exonerated. Jones is the 129^th person exonerated from death row in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976 and the eighth condemned man to be freed from North Carolina's death row in less than four months.

His release comes as the legal system is re-examining the use of capital punishment in North Carolina. The investigation led federal Judge Terrence Boyle to overturn the conviction after declaring Jones' rights had been violated because of poor attorney performance. Boyle deemed the performance, of defense attorneys Graham Phillips Jr. and Charles C. Henderson, "constitutionally deficient". He criticized the lawyers for failing to research the state's star witness' history well enough to try to discredit her before jurors. He also said they had inadequately prepared to investigate Jones' mental health problems and troubled childhood in attempts to ask the jury to spare Jones the death penalty.

"Given the weakness of the prosecution's case and its heavy reliance on the testimony of Lovely Lorden, there is a reasonable probability that, but for counsel's unprofessional errors, the result of the proceeding would have been different."

Lovely Lorden was the state's star witness and Jones' former lover. Last April, in an affidavit that Jones' attorneys filed, she recanted her testimony. Lorden said, "Much of what I testified to was simply not true." She said a detective coached her on what to say at Jones' trial and that of co-defendant Larry Lamb. She collected $4,000 from the governor's office as a reward for offering the clues that led to arrests.

Jones' case proves, once again, that the death penalty, besides all the other problems it has, could take the life of an innocent person. One usually thinks that wrongful convictions, innocent people in jail, only happens in movies or soap operas, and that if it were to happen in real life it will just be one in a million. Unfortunately, wrongful convictions, like Jones' case, are more common than we think. Some of the factors leading to wrongful convictions include: inadequate legal representation, police and prosecutorial misconduct, perjured testimony and mistaken eyewitness testimony, racial prejudice, jailhouse "snitch" testimony, suppression and/or misinterpretation of mitigating evidence and community/political pressure to solve a case.

The death penalty is a system which has already proven to be fraught with error therefore is time to abolish it.

~Tania, DPAC intern

Cuba's death penalty is usually carried out by firing squad but Cuba is ceasing the fire. Past Monday, new Cuban President Raul Castro announced that all death sentences had been commuted to prison terms of 30 years to life, with the exception of 3 people charged with terrorism.

Elizardo Sánchez, president of the dissident Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said that according to his group's estimates, around 30 people on death row will benefit from the decision. Some of them have been awaiting execution for more than 10 years.

"This decision was not undertaken because of pressure, but as a sovereign act in line with the humanitarian and ethical conduct that has characterized the Cuban revolution from the start," said Raul Castro. He also noted that party leader Fidel Castro supports -when favorable conditions exist- the elimination of the death penalty for any type of crime and opposes the extrajudicial methods that some well-known countries shamelessly practice. He clarified that this agreement by the Council of State does not mean the elimination of capital punishment in the Cuban Penal Code, noting that under current circumstances the country dismantle itself before an empire that has not ceased to harass and attack the island.

Just 3 people have been executed since 2000, all of them involved in a failed 2003 boat hijacking. Now 3 men remained in death row: Salvadoran nationals Raúl Ernesto Cruz and Otto René Rodríguez, who were sentenced to death in 1999, and Cuban citizen Humberto Eladio Real. The two Salvadoran citizens were convicted of carrying out a string of terrorist bombings in tourism establishments in Havana in the summer of 1997, one of which resulted in the death of an Italian businessman. While the Cuban citizen, Real, was arrested in 1994 after illegally landing in Cuba and murdering a man in order to steal his car. He was sentenced for crimes against the security of the state, homicide and the illegal use of firearms.

Cuba's penal code establishes the death penalty for crimes against the country's external security, including acts aimed at undermining its independence or territorial integrity, the promotion of armed actions against Cuba, aiding the enemy, and espionage. Capital punishment was also reserved in Cuba for the most serious cases of homicide, rape, sexual abuse of minors involving violence, robbery involving violence and intimidation, and crimes in which corruption serves as an aggravating factor. But the death penalty cannot be applied in the case of people under 20 or women who were pregnant at the time the crime was committed or when the sentence was handed down. In practice, no woman has been executed since the 1959 revolution.

Since taking over from his ailing brother Fidel Castro in February, Raul Castro has lifted a number of restrictions on daily life, from owning cell phones to entering tourist hotels. Cuba in early March signed 2 important United Nations human rights agreements long opposed by Fidel Castro.

While Cuba seems to be moving forward, on the other hand the U.S is failing to comply with international agreements and it is reinstating the death penalty. What would happen if Cuba abolishes the death penalty before the United States? The U.S. criticizes Cuba for all the human rights violations that still persists in the Island but if Cuba abolishes the death penalty it would be one step ahead of the U.S. I am not saying Cuba's problems and human rights violations have suddenly disappear and I know some things are not as they appear; we still need to be on the look out for Cuba's human rights infringements. What I'm saying is that the U.S. proud itself for being a democratic country which protects human rights but a socialist country is doing the right thing, commuting death sentences, while the U.S. is stuck in prehistoric practices like the capital punishment.

~Tania, DPAC intern

The death penalty is arbitrary, unfair, not a deterrence of crime, more costly than life imprisonment and, moreover, it is a human rights violation that is taking away the lives of people who well may be innocent. More than 126 prisoners have been released form U.S. death row since 1976, because they were found innocent after spending years imprisoned. More than 100 countries around the world have abolished the death penalty and if all this wasn't enough, other countries, our allies have denounced the U.S. for the capital punishment. Now, the European Union is asking the United States to halt executions and it is not the first time they have appealed to the U.S. government to abolish the death penalty. What is it going to take for the U.S. to abolish the death penalty?

Friday 25, 2008 the European Union protested the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the use of lethal injection as a means for carrying out the death penalty and it asked Governor Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky to commute the execution of a convicted cop-killer. "The European Union notes with disappointment the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on this case and renews its call on Gov. Ernie Fletcher to commute the sentence" an EU statement said.

The EU also restated its opposition to capital punishment and encouraged the United States to reinstate the de-facto moratorium to allow a thorough nationwide debate. None of the 27 members of the EU has the death penalty.

~Tania, DPAC intern