“As a result, hundreds of defendants nationwide remain in prison or on parole for crimes that might merit exoneration, a retrial or a retesting of evidence using DNA because FBI hair and fiber experts may have misidentified them as suspects. … In one Texas case, Benjamin Herbert Boyle was executed in 1997, more than a year after the Justice Department began its review. Boyle would not have been eligible for the death penalty without the FBI’s flawed work, according to a prosecutor’s memo.”
this is very odd to read. so many people talking about God, some people claiming to be innocent…
“Are they already doing it? I’m gonna go to sleep. See you later. This stuff stings, man almighty.”
Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeifer, family members of murder victims, and Death Row exonerees urge Ohio lawmakers to abolish capital punishment:
“The death penalty in Ohio has become what I call a death lottery,” Pfeifer told the House Criminal Justice Committee. “The application is hit or miss depending on where you happen to commit the crime and the attitude of the prosecutor in that county.”
He added: “I believe Ohio is no longer well served by our death-penalty statute. It should be repealed.”
…
Derrick Jamison was freed after 17 years for the 1984 murder of Cincinnati bartender Gary Mitchell. Dale Johnston was exonerated in 1990 after serving seven years for the dismemberment slayings of his daughter, Annette Cooper, and her friend Todd Schultz.
Jamison tearfully recounted the death of his mother and father while he was in prison. “I am not a statistic. I am a person, a child of God who did not deserve the death penalty,” he said.
…
Lawrence Herman, a former Ohio State University law professor, said he thinks capital punishment should be repealed, in part because innocent people are wrongfully convicted.
“It’s certainly likely … that we have executed several persons that were factually innocent,” Herman said.
More here:
“Thirty-five years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court brought back the death penalty, reasoning that judges and juries could be provided with enough guidance to identify the offenders most deserving of capital punishment,” said Dale Johnston, who was wrongly convicted of the 1982 murder of his daughter and her boyfriend and spent seven years behind bars. “After three and a half decades of experimentation, it is time to admit the obvious: If the ultimate punishment cannot be applied fairly, it should not be applied at all.”
The Dec. 14 hearing included comments from Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer, one of the authors of the death penalty law on the books in Ohio, who now opposes capital punishment.
“Is Ohio well served by the death penalty at this point in time?” he asked. “… We tried to make sure that it would only be applied to the worst of the worst. I’m here today to testify and indicate to you I believe Ohio is no longer well served by our death penalty statute and it should be repealed.”
The Supreme Court justice also said data indicate capital punishment does not deter violent crimes.
“If you look at the data from states that don’t have it, you see roughly the same number of murders, aggravated murders,” he said. “So it’s impossible to make a case that the death penalty deters anyone.”
“Unfortunately, the trial court’s order offers no explanation for its conclusion that DNA testing is not called for in this case,” said Rob Owen, attorney for Hank Skinner and clinical law professor at the University of Texas School of Law. “It will now be up to the Court of Criminal Appeals to give Mr. Skinner’s case the deliberate consideration that is necessary to ensure a correct result.”
I don’t want to sound an overly pessimistic tone … but I have a sneaking suspicion that the appeals court won’t give Skinner’s case the consideration for which his lawyer is hoping. Skinner’s lawyers know this, but it’s not really something they can say to a reporter.
Maybe I’ll be wrong this time; that would be fantastic. But it would also be a fluke, an unusual result in a bizarre system that defies most attempts at predition. And yet pundits — from Texas — continue to claim that the system is working. It’s not. It’s fundamentally broken. The cases that make this clear are far more numerous than the unusual cases where courts actually offer some remedy for the errors that have taken place.
On this particular case, you can find more here. And here. And here.
A petition that asks the state of Texas to test the DNA evidence is here.
“If we don’t stand up for people like Troy Davis, then we are no better than the people that put them there.”
(Source: pantslessprogressive)
The “Oh, really?” quote pull:
“If you’re reading this from another state, there’s a good chance your Governor can’t match Perry’s record on criminal-justice reform.”
The Editorial Board of the Dallas Morning News was creeped out by that crowd applauding the execution body count too:
Debate moderator Brian Williams might have thought he had a clever question — do you sleep well at night, governor? — but that overlooked the goings-on in Texas even as he spoke.
A better question might have focused on the refusal by Texas courts to permit forensic analysis of untested evidence in the Hank Skinner murder case out of West Texas. Does the governor lose sleep over Skinner’s execution date of Nov. 9, or is he confident that the courts will have it all sorted out by then?
Perry also might have been asked about this week’s scheduled execution of convicted double murderer Duane Edward Buck out of Houston. In the trial’s punishment phase, an expert testified that Buck was more likely to be a future danger to society because he is black. Then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn admitted that the state was wrong to allow juries to consider such outrageous testimony in this case and six others, and he asked the Supreme Court to allow for punishment retrials. But technicalities prevented a new sentencing from happening in the Buck case, unlike the others. Has the governor lost sleep over an unconstitutional punishment process?
And has the governor lost a wink thinking about how to address the hideous Anthony Graves miscarriage of justice? Here was a man railroaded by a Central Texas prosecutor in the sensational slayings of six family members. Isn’t it true that Graves might never have been freed last year had it not been for college journalism and law students who laid the foundation for his innocence? Is this the same system in which the governor has unshakable faith?
Perry was right about one thing: The public is generally comfortable with the death penalty. But consider that a mere theoretical statement. Dig deeper into uncomfortable truths and, we think, the public will see hard realities that are impossible to defend.
“Due process requires no less when a life is at stake. Yet here, the court clerk did nothing when the notices to both Maples’ out-of-state pro bono attorneys of record were returned unopened and unclaimed, except to stick the notices in a file drawer.”
Gregory Garre, a Washington lawyer representing Alabama Death Row inmate Cory Maples, who was found guilty of murdering two people in 1995. His case will be one of the first the U.S. Supreme Court will hear when it returns this fall.
After being sentenced to death, a “subsequent appeal was denied and notice was sent by the Alabama court clerk to his attorneys in New York, who took the case pro bono but had since left the firm. The envelopes were returned to the clerk’s office, unopened. By the time Maples had learned of the denial, the deadline to file his next appeal had passed.”
![“The way I look at it, what I created can and may already have resulted in the death of an innocent person. And that’s pretty heavy.”
Donald Heller, the author of the 1978 California ballot measure that greatly expanded the list of murders eligible for capital punishment explains why he now opposes the death penalty:
I started thinking of some things that I never really thought about when I wrote it. One was the enormous toll it took on people involved. The human element — not [so much] the defendants but the people in the system. I was in a restaurant bar in Sacramento celebrating a settlement. At the bar was a lawyer I [knew]; his head was down on the bar and he was completely drunk. I said, “Are you OK?” He said: “They just sentenced my client to death, and I really like him and it’s just a bad decision.” Eventually he got out of criminal practice. I [also] started noticing the toll it took on judges pronouncing a sentence of death.I have a high regard for prosecutors — I could count on one hand the prosecutors I felt were unethical — but I saw the aggressiveness to get death. It became, with some, a game. I would see the quality of the court-appointed lawyers. Some were good, some mediocre, some less than mediocre. Defendants didn’t get what they were entitled to, and that’s why you [saw] quite a few reversals of verdicts in the Rose Bird court. That incensed the public. What the death penalty brought about [was] bad decisions and bad law.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lp6ideN6Lj1qz8qego1_400.jpg)
“The way I look at it, what I created can and may already have resulted in the death of an innocent person. And that’s pretty heavy.”
Donald Heller, the author of the 1978 California ballot measure that greatly expanded the list of murders eligible for capital punishment explains why he now opposes the death penalty:
I started thinking of some things that I never really thought about when I wrote it. One was the enormous toll it took on people involved. The human element — not [so much] the defendants but the people in the system. I was in a restaurant bar in Sacramento celebrating a settlement. At the bar was a lawyer I [knew]; his head was down on the bar and he was completely drunk. I said, “Are you OK?” He said: “They just sentenced my client to death, and I really like him and it’s just a bad decision.” Eventually he got out of criminal practice. I [also] started noticing the toll it took on judges pronouncing a sentence of death.
I have a high regard for prosecutors — I could count on one hand the prosecutors I felt were unethical — but I saw the aggressiveness to get death. It became, with some, a game. I would see the quality of the court-appointed lawyers. Some were good, some mediocre, some less than mediocre. Defendants didn’t get what they were entitled to, and that’s why you [saw] quite a few reversals of verdicts in the Rose Bird court. That incensed the public. What the death penalty brought about [was] bad decisions and bad law.
If you click on one youtube link today, make it this one.
Hate crime victim Rais Bhuiyan calls for the death row pardon of his attacker Mark Stroman. This was the first known hate crime targeting muslims as a retaliation for the World Trade Center disaster on September 11, 2001. Mr Stroman is scheduled to be executed in Texas on July 20th, 2011.
Hate only brings fear, misery, resentment and disaster into human lives. It creates obstacles to healthy human growth, which, in turn, diminishes society as a whole.
In order to live in a better and peaceful world, we need to break the cycle of hate and violence. Mr Bhuiyan is working to educate those who may be as ignorant as Mark Stroman and raise a consciousness among people that hating others can never bring lasting peace and satisfaction.
For more information, and to stop the cycle of violence, please sign the petition requesting that Mark Stroman’s death penalty be commuted to life in prison with no parole at worldwithouthate.org
I’ve seen articles about this story over the past few months, but to hear it straight from the victim in this video in particular seems to embody the Prayer of Saint Francis of Assisi.
If we can forget about who didn’t get the death penalty for a moment …
“I think there is one vote that I would change and that’s one – was upholding the capital punishment statute. I think that we did not foresee how it would be interpreted. I think that was an incorrect decision.”
John Paul Stevens in an NPR interview last October.
Tomorrow marks 35 years since the 7-2 decision in Gregg v. Georgia that reinstated the death penalty, with Stevens being among three of the seven justices in the majority that have since expressed regret about their decision.
A few things to make note of here:
The state’s 714 death row prisoners cost $184 million more per year than those sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
A death penalty prosecution costs up to 20 times as much as a life-without-parole case.
The least expensive death penalty trial costs $1.1 million more than the most expensive life-without-parole case.
Jury selection in a capital case runs three to four weeks longer and costs $200,000 more than in life-without-parole cases.
The state pays up to $300,000 for attorneys to represent each capital inmate on appeal.
The heightened security practices mandated for death row inmates added $100,663 to the cost of incarcerating each capital prisoner last year, for a total of $72 million.
(via klkocher)
Even proponents of capital punishment are opposing the planned execution of Humberto Leal:
Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, a treaty ratified by 173 nations, establishes that whenever the authorities arrest a foreign national, they must advise her that she has the right to have her consulate notified of her detention. This applies to foreign nationals arrested in the United States as well as to Americans detained abroad. American foreign exchange students, missionaries and others who have been wrongly detained overseas often say that the assistance of the consulate is more important than the advice of a foreign lawyer. American consulates can help them contact family members, obtain evidence back home, and assist in obtaining competent legal representation.
But when Texas authorities arrested Humberto Leal García, a Mexican national with no prior criminal convictions, they tried, convicted, and sentenced him to death without ever informing him of his consular rights and without notifying the Mexican consulate of his plight. On March 31, 2004, the International Court of Justice held that the United States had breached its obligations under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention in the case of Mr. Leal and 50 other Mexican nationals on death row. The ICJ held that, as a remedy for the violations of Article 36, the United States must provide judicial “review and reconsideration” of Mr. Leal’s conviction and sentence to determine whether, and how, he was prejudiced by the violation of his consular rights.
Without the assistance of the Mexican consulate, Humberto Leal received disgracefully inadequate legal representation. One of his trial attorneys has been reprimanded or suspended from the practice of law on multiple occasions as a result of ethical violations. Mr. Leal was convicted on the basis of junk “bite mark” science, since discredited by the National Academy of Sciences, and patently unreliable forensic evidence. Although the prosecution’s case was reed thin, his defense failed to effectively challenge any of this evidence. During his sentencing hearing, which lasted only a single day, Mr. Leal’s attorneys failed to present any of the profoundly mitigating evidence that later came to light with the assistance of the Mexican government. The jury that sentenced Mr. Leal to death never learned that he was the victim of horrific sexual abuse by his parish priest, which had severe and lasting effects. Jurors never realized that Mr. Leal had struggled to overcome learning disabilities and frontal lobe brain damage and spent his childhood dodging neighborhood gangs and beatings from his parents. Based on the distorted, incomplete picture of Mr. Leal provided by the prosecution, he never stood a chance.
Former President Bush directed the Texas courts to review Mr. Leal’s conviction and sentence in accordance with the ICJ’s decision, but Texas refused. The United States Supreme Court has found that while the U.S. has an international legal obligation to comply with the ICJ’s decision, only Congress can implement the decision by passing legislation. Congress is now poised to do just that - but Texas has announced that it nonetheless intends to go forward with Mr. Leal’s execution. A stay of execution is essential to prevent an irreparable breach of the United States’ treaty commitments, and to protect the rights of all Americans who rely on the protections of the Vienna Convention. And unless Mr. Leal receives a reprieve, he will die before he ever sees justice.
Much more about Leal’s story here:
The right to consular access is something that U.S. citizens abroad rely on “literally every day,” Huffman said. “We’ve already got one irrevocable violation of that international obligation, and that’s something that is taken very seriously by our international partners.
“To do that again? It’s hard to dismiss it as an aberration if it happens again.”
Should the U.S. continue to disregard its obligations under the Vienna Convention, American travelers risk losing what Bellinger called “one of the most important rights that Americans have if they’re arrested abroad.” And they’ll only have Texas, and our unresponsive Congress, to blame.
You can sign a petition here.
