Death Penalty

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