Sept. 25
USA:
On death penalty, confidence does not replace truth
2000: Frank Lee Smith is posthumously exonerated — he’d died 11 months earlier
— 14 years after being convicted of raping and murdering an 8-year-old girl.
The eyewitnesses were wrong.
2001: Charles Fain is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced to
death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a young girl. The scientific
testimony was wrong.
2002: Ray Krone is exonerated and set free 10 years after being sentenced to
death for the kidnapping, rape and murder of a bar worker. The scientific
testimony was wrong.
2003: John Thompson is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced
to death for murder. The prosecutors hid exculpatory scientific evidence and
the eyewitnesses were wrong.
2004: Ryan Matthews is exonerated and set free 5 years after being sentenced to
death for killing a convenience store owner. The eyewitnesses were wrong.
2008: Kennedy Brewer is exonerated and set free 7 years after being sentenced
to death for killing his girlfriend’s three-year-old daughter. The scientific
testimony was wrong.
2010: Anthony Graves is exonerated and set free 18 years after being sentenced
to death for the murder of an entire family. The sole eyewitness —who was
himself the murderer — lied.
I could make a much longer list.
There are literally hundreds, of men and even a few women who have been
exonerated and set free after being sentenced to death, life, 25, 60, even 400
years for awful things they did not do. I could make a longer list, but space
is at a premium and there is more that needs saying here.
They killed Troy Davis Wednesday night.
He went to his death still proclaiming his innocence of the 1989 murder of a
Savannah, Ga., police officer. Davis was convicted on “evidence” that boiled
down to the testimony of 9 eyewitnesses, 7 of whom later recanted.
But Spencer Lawton, who originally prosecuted the case, would not want you to
worry your head about that. Hours before Davis was put to death, Lawton was
quoted by CNN as saying he had no doubts about the case and was confident Davis
was the killer. How much do you want to bet the prosecutors of Fain, Brewer,
Krone or any of those hundreds of others would have said the same thing,
expressed the same confidence? Without that confidence, the whole house of
cards comes tumbling down.
Meaning the death penalty, a flimsy edifice erected on the shaky premise that
we always get it right, that human systems always work as designed, that
witnesses make no mistakes, that science is never fallible, that cops never
lie, that lawyers are never incompetent.
You have to believe that. You have to make yourself believe it. Otherwise, how
do you sleep at night?
So of course a prosecutor speaks confidence. What else is he going to speak?
Truth? Truth is too big, too dangerous, too damning. Truth asks a simple
question: In what field of endeavor have we always gotten it right? And you
know the answer to that.
So truth is too pregnant for speaking. Better to avert your eyes and profess
your confidence.
But one day, too late for Troy Davis, too late for too many, truth will out.
Godspeed that day the cards come tumbling down.
(source: Column, Leonard Pitts, Jr., Miami Herald)
**********************
Death penalty revisited
UNRELIABLE eyewitnesses, the impact of race on a jury in the Deep South, the
difficulty of proving innocence once convicted: Troy Davis’ long journey
through the United States judicial system has hit nearly every sensitive button
in America’s complex relationship with the death penalty.
Hundreds of protesters gather at the Georgia State Capitol in Atlanta to
protest the planned execution of Troy Anthony Davis on Sept. 20. He was
executed the next day. On Tuesday, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles
declined a final clemency bid by Davis, 42, who has spent 20 years on death row
for the murder of an off-duty Savannah, Ga., police officer in 1989. The board
reaffirmed the validity of the original conviction by a jury of his peers. He
was executed by lethal injection Wednesday evening.
But to many legal experts, doubts raised about Davis’ guilt after his
conviction raise new questions about the Supreme Court’s determination that
so-called “executive clemency” — the power of a governor or review board to
commute a death row sentence — is an adequate fail-safe for assessing death row
innocence claims.
“If a case like this doesn’t result in clemency, which is a discretionary
process that calls a halt to an execution based on doubt surrounding the
integrity of the verdict, then it suggests that clemency as a traditional
fail-safe is not adequate,” says James Acker, a criminologist at SUNY-Albany.
“The Davis case raises doubts about the discretionary clemency process and
ultimately raises doubts about whether the legal system can tolerate this
potential error in allowing a person to be executed.”
While the number of people executed in the United States has dwindled steadily
over the past 15 years, a majority of Americans — about 64 % — still support
the death penalty.
Death tally elicits cheers
At a recent GOP presidential candidate debate, a crowd cheered when Texas Gov.
Rick Perry, the current Republican frontrunner, noted the 234 executions
carried out under his watch.
But also this summer, an Arkansas judge allowed a complex legal maneuver to
free 3 men known as the West Memphis 3, including one who was on death row, for
the murder of 3 boys 18 years ago. Moreover, North Carolina, once one of the
most active death-penalty states, currently has a moratorium on the sanction.
“The death penalty is really fading in the United States, and there is a lot of
disagreement about why that is, but certainly, [there are] fewer executions
than there used to be,” said the New Yorker magazine’s legal writer, Jeffrey
Toobin, in a CNN interview Tuesday.
DNA-based death row exonerations have influenced the public’s view, but the
Troy Davis case rises to the top of the death-penalty debate for several
reasons.
Unprecedented public support
For one, he was arguably the best-known person on any United States death row,
and the show of public support for a new trial had been unprecedented, with
nearly 700,000 people petitioning the parole board. Global figures like Pope
Benedict XVI, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former President Jimmy Carter, and even
death-penalty supporters like former Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., all urged the parole
board to either commute his sentence or give him a new trial.
In an indication of the seriousness of the doubts about the case, the U.S.
Supreme Court in 2009 transferred Davis’ writ of habeas corpus, or request for
relief from unlawful imprisonment, to a U.S. District Court — the first time it
had granted such a request in half a century.
2 dissenting justices, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, called the ruling a
“fool’s errand.”
The federal judge assigned to the case, Judge William T. Moore of the U.S.
District Court of Southern Georgia, concluded in 2010 that new evidence and
testimony, including that seven of nine witnesses had changed or recanted
testimony, |wasn’t enough to prove his innocence.
“The state’s case may not be ironclad, but most reasonable jurors would again
vote to convict Mr. Davis,” Judge Moore wrote in his ruling.
In 1993, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Herrera v. Collins that an
individual’s provable innocence isn’t, by constitutional standards, enough for
courts to grant a new trial. The ruling put the onus on discretionary
state-by-state executive clemency procedures — whether by extrajudicial boards
or governors — as the “fail-safe.”
“I really think that the decision made in Georgia puts the assumption that
executive clemency is a fail-safe in so much doubt that it ought to stimulate
the legal system — to revise, reform, revisit the formal legal process that
results in convictions and allows sentences of death,” says SUNY-Albany’s
Acker. “In this case, the clemency process has failed.”
The Georgia parole board noted that it has commuted 3 death sentences since
2000, and said in a statement that its five members “considered the totality of
the evidence” and that members “have not taken their responsibility lightly.”
Officer’s family wants closure
The family of the slain police officer, Mark MacPhail, said that Davis and his
family had duped people into believing in his innocence. “We know what the
truth is,” MacPhail’s widow, Joan MacPhail-Harris, told CNN. “And for someone
to ludicrously say that he is a victim — we are victims. Look at us. We have
put up with this stuff for 22 years. It’s time for justice. We need our
justice.”
But others believe Davis’ claims of innocence and the substantial doubts about
whether a jury today would find him guilty present the United States with a
moral quandary that could reflect more broadly on the death penalty.
“At its core, I think this case represents a serious moral issue,” the Rev.
Raphael Warnock of the Ebenezer Baptist Church told The Christian Post. “If
we’re able to execute a man with this much doubt, that is not good for our
moral health.”
(source: Opinion, Patrik Jonsson, NorthJersey.com)
****************
Justice After Troy Davis
It's easy to see why the case of Troy Davis, the Georgia man executed last week
for the 1989 killing of an off-duty police officer, became a cause célèbre for
death penalty opponents. Davis was identified as the shooter by witnesses who
later claimed to have been coerced by investigators. He was prosecuted and
convicted based on the same dubious eyewitness testimony, rather than forensic
evidence. And his appeals process managed to be ponderously slow without
delivering anything like certainty: it took the courts 20 years to say a final
no to the second trial that Davis may well have deserved.
For many observers, the lesson of this case is simple: We need to abolish the
death penalty outright. The argument that capital punishment is inherently
immoral has long been a losing one in American politics. But in the age of DNA
evidence and endless media excavations, the argument that courts and juries are
just too fallible to be trusted with matters of life and death may prove more
effective.
If capital punishment disappears in the United States, it won’t be because
voters and politicians no longer want to execute the guilty. It will be because
they’re afraid of executing the innocent.
This is a healthy fear for a society to have. But there’s a danger here for
advocates of criminal justice reform. After all, in a world without the death
penalty, Davis probably wouldn’t have been retried or exonerated. His appeals
would still have been denied, he would have spent the rest of his life in
prison, and far fewer people would have known or cared about his fate.
Instead, he received a level of legal assistance, media attention and activist
support that few convicts can ever hope for. And his case became an example of
how the very finality of the death penalty can focus the public’s attention on
issues that many Americans prefer to ignore: the overzealousness of cops and
prosecutors, the limits of the appeals process and the ugly conditions faced by
many of the more than two million Americans currently behind bars.
Simply throwing up our hands and eliminating executions entirely, by contrast,
could prove to be a form of moral evasion — a way to console ourselves with the
knowledge that no innocents are ever executed, even as more pervasive abuses go
unchecked. We should want a judicial system that we can trust with matters of
life and death, and that can stand up to the kind of public scrutiny that
Davis’s case received. And gradually reforming the death penalty — imposing it
in fewer situations and with more safeguards, which other defendants could
benefit from as well — might do more than outright abolition to address the
larger problems with crime and punishment in America.
This point was made well last week by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, writing for The
American Scene. In any penal system, he pointed out, but especially in our own
— which can be brutal, overcrowded, rife with rape and other forms of violence
— a lifelong prison sentence can prove more cruel and unusual than a speedy
execution. And a society that supposedly values liberty as much or more than
life itself hasn’t necessarily become more civilized if it preserves its
convicts’ lives while consistently violating their rights and dignity. It’s
just become better at self-deception about what’s really going on.
Fundamentally, most Americans who support the death penalty do so because they
want to believe that our justice system is just, and not merely a mechanism for
quarantining the dangerous in order to keep the law-abiding safe. The case for
executing murderers is a case for proportionality in punishment: for sentences
that fit the crime, and penalties that close the circle.
Instead of dismissing this point of view as backward and barbaric, criminal
justice reformers should try to harness it, by pointing out that too often our
punishments don’t fit the crime — that sentences for many drug crimes are
disproportionate to the offenses, for instance, or that rape and sexual assault
have become an implicit part of many prison terms. Americans should be urged to
support penal reform not in spite of their belief that some murderers deserve
execution, in other words, but because of it — because both are attempts to
ensure that accused criminals receive their just deserts.
Abolishing capital punishment in a kind of despair over its fallibility would
send a very different message. It would tell the public that our laws and
courts and juries are fundamentally incapable of delivering what most Americans
consider genuine justice. It could encourage a more cynical and utilitarian
view of why police forces and prisons exist, and what moral standards we should
hold them to. And while it would put an end to wrongful executions, it might
well lead to more overall injustice.
(source: Op-Ed, Ross Douthat, New York Times)
NORTH CAROLINA:
Asheville and Georgia cases ignite death penalty debate----1 execution, 2
exonerations raise questions of justice
15 hours stood between the execution of Troy Davis amid questions over his true
guilt and the sunny afternoon 2 Asheville men exonerated in another murder case
walked free.
But the cases stand out for reasons other than just timing. Though each held
significant differences from the other, they both have reignited debate over
the death penalty and imperfections within our justice system.
Davis, convicted of killing an off-duty police officer in Georgia in 1989, was
given a trial.
Kenneth Kagonyera and Robert Wilcoxson pleaded guilty to 2nd-degree murder in a
2000 slaying under threats from investigators and prosecutors and even their
own attorneys and family, who wanted to spare them life in prison or the
possibility of a death sentence.
Davis gained national attention, with even the pope questioning his guilt.
The case of Kagonyera and Wilcoxson generated passing interest before they were
freed Thursday.
But where Davis had to work within the court system, Kagonyera and Wilcoxson
had the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission.
Its success with their case will give new momentum to calls for similar justice
system checks in other states.
“Courts are traditionally jaded and don’t want to believe people can be
wrongfully convicted,” said Winston-Salem attorney Mark Rabil, who heads the
Wake Forest University School of Law Innocence and Justice Clinic.
“Somebody needs to be looking over the court system,” he said.
N.C. commission unique
North Carolina has the nation’s only investigative innocence commission.
It examines and evaluates post-conviction claims of factual innocence and can
refer cases to a 3-judge panel for a ruling.
The commission’s budget is $403,714 a year for a staff of 5.
The federal government kicked in another $566,890 for 18 months starting in
January 2010. The money funds 2 additional attorneys to investigate homicide
and sex offense cases in which DNA testing can be used.
The Kagonyera and Wilcoxson case, stemming from a robbery and killing in
Fairview, was handled under the federal grant.
The commission, according to its annual report last year, has requested
$273,382 in recurring funding from the state to keep the extra attorneys and
cover the costs of investigations and DNA testing.
6 other states — California, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin — have established policy commissions, according to the New
York-based Innocence Project. The commissions study the causes of wrongful
convictions and make recommendations to lawmakers, police and the courts.
Georgia, where Davis was executed Wednesday night, does not have a policy or
investigative innocence commission.
2 claims, 2 outcomes
In most states, parole and pardon boards, or the governor, have the authority
to commute death sentences to life in prison because of concerns over
innocence.
In Georgia, the pardon board declined to overturn the death sentence in the
Davis case.
A federal judge last year came to the same conclusion.
Davis was charged with murdering off-duty Savannah Police Officer Mark Allen
MacPhail in a Burger King parking lot.
MacPhail was working a side job as a security guard and had intervened in a
fight between 2 men in the parking lot when he was shot.
Davis, prosecutors said, shot MacPhail during the altercation. No other motive
was presented in court.
7 of the state’s 9 witnesses later recanted.
Davis pleaded not guilty. He maintained his innocence, even minutes before he
was executed.
U.S. District Court Judge William T. Moore reviewed the investigation in
174-page opinion that Davis was guilty.<>P> The judge wrote that 6 of the 7
recantations were not credible, including 2 he found “impossible to believe”
and contradicted by other testimony.
Moore said he believed another man later confessed to killing the officer to
bolster his reputation as a tough guy in the neighborhood.
“Ultimately, while Mr. Davis’s new evidence cast some additional, minimal
doubt, it is largely smoke and mirrors,” the judge wrote in denying the claim.
Pope Benedict XVI and former President Jimmy Carter, along with Amnesty
International, supported Davis’ claim of innocence.
The evidence of innocence in the Kagonyera and Wilcoxson case was very
different.
They pleaded guilty in the killing of Walter Rodney Bowman in Fairview.
The men said they took the plea deals to avoid life in prison.
A federal inmate serving time on an unrelated conviction later confessed to a
police officer his involvement in the murder and implicated two other men — a
group that had originally been identified in the first CrimeStoppers tip made
in the case.
DNA found on bandanas and gloves near the crime scene matched this group of
men.
Kagonyera repeatedly tried to recant his plea from his prison cell. He filed
motion after motion asking to withdraw his plea and for DNA testing on bandanas
and gloves found near the crime scene.
It took the state innocence commission’s involvement before anyone took his
claim seriously.
Rabil, the Wake Forest University innocence project leader and an assistant
capital defender, said the case shows the need for the state’s innocence
commission.
Rabil handled the innocence claim of Darryl Hunt, who spent 19 years in prison
for rape and murder before he was exonerated by DNA evidence.
He said the courts are, for the most part, dedicated to finality in legal
cases. Judges have a hard time understanding cases like the Kagonyera and
Wilcoxson claim, though about a quarter of exonerations nationally involve
people who pleaded guilty or made false confessions, according to the Innocence
Project.
“They find it very difficult to believe someone would plead guilty to something
they didn’t do,” he said.
But whether North Carolina is the right model for other states is debated.
Should other states follow NC?
Rabil said other states are envious of North Carolina’s commission.
The 8-member commission — made up of prosecutors, police, defense attorneys and
victim advocates — must vote unanimously to send a case to a 3-judge panel.
Kagonyera and Wilcoxson are the 2nd and 3rd men to be freed in North Carolina
since the commission was created 5 years ago.
The commission provides an extra-judicial process for determining innocence,
but it also has an important side effect: It keeps the courts honest.
Rabil said he has heard prosecutors discussing their fears that cases might one
day come back on review by the innocence commission. Even in Georgia, where
Davis’ claims didn’t appear as strong as the claims of Kagonyera and Wilcoxson,
a state-run commission could have helped, Rabil said.
An investigative innocence commission could have quickly checked the
recantations, some of which were a decade old by the time the courts considered
Davis’ case.
But others in the innocence community disagree.
Stephen Saloom, policy director of the Innocence Project, said the three
exonerations by North Carolina’s commission deserve credit.
The other innocence commissions in the country make policy recommendations but
have no investigative ability.
Those are important, too, in criminal justice reform because they take the
politics out of the discussion by bringing all the stakeholders together. The
Innocence Project says the key to stopping wrongful convictions is reforming
the criminal justice system to prevent, among other problems, police
misidentification of suspects and poor storage and preservation of DNA
evidence.
Saloom’s not convinced that every state needs and extra-judicial investigative
commission.
“North Carolina deserves tremendous credit,” he said. “But frankly, every state
claims that the mission of its court system is to do justice, and it seems it
is only a failure to appreciate the realities of wrongful convictions or
procedural rules that prevent sufficient consideration of new evidence of
innocence or simply the unwillingness of key decision makers in that justice
system that keep any state from getting the justice it seeks for wrongful
convictions from its court system.”
(source: Asheville Citizen-Times)
ILLLINOIS:
Exonerated Death-Row Inmate Charged with Theft
A former death row inmate who was exonerated days before execution was arrested
Friday, accused of stealing deodorant from a South Side Walgreens.
Anthony Porter's 1999 release from prison was key to Illinois ending the death
penalty this year.
The Chicago Tribune reports the 56-year-old was arrested and charged with
retail theft. He's been ordered held on $10,000 bail.
Porter served 17 years for a 1982 double murder before evidence surfaced he was
innocent, thanks to the work of a Northwestern University professor and his
students. At one point in 1998, he was just 48 hours shy of execution when
attorneys won a stay by raising concerns about his mental competence at trial.
The Northwestern professor, David Protess, and his students obtained a
confession from another man for the murders, which eventually led to Porter
being set free.
At his bond hearing Saturday, prosecutors included the homicide charges as they
listed Porter's criminal background. But, according to the Tribune, Porter
softly asked his attorney to point out he was exonerated of those charges.
Former Gov. George Ryan has said Porter's release from prison was a reason he
cleared death row in 2003.
Gov. Pat Quinn officially abolished Illinois' death penalty in March of this
year.
(source: NBC Chicago)
PENNSYLVANIA:
Mother/grandmother of murder victims hopes for execution
The mother of Victoria Adams and grandmother of Sidney Parrish, both shot to
death by Michael Parrish, is clear on her hopes with regards to the man who
killed them.
"I'm looking for the death penalty," Kim Adams said of shooter Michael Parrish.
***
ABOUT THE DEATH PENALTY IN PA.
HISTORY: Pennsylvania's death penalty dates back to the 1600s. Pennsylvania was
the 1st state, in 1834, to move away from public hangings to private executions
conducted within the commonwealth's county prisons and jails.
Hanging was the method of execution until 1915, when the electric chair came
into use.
Lethal injection replaced the electric chair in 1990.
EXECUTIONS: From 1915 to 1962, 350 people were executed by electric chair,
including 2 women.
The law was declared unconstitutional in 1971 and re-enacted in 1974.
Pennsylvania has had 3 executions since that time.
The last execution was on July 6, 1999, when Gary Heidnik was executed by
lethal injection. He had been convicted and given 2 death sentences in July
1988 for savagely murdering 2 women he had imprisoned in his home. He was also
convicted of 6 counts of kidnapping, 5 counts of rape, 4 counts of aggravated
assault and 2 counts of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse. In addition to
the death sentences, he also received a cumulative prison term of 150 to 300
years.
ON DEATH ROW: 211 inmates are on death row, including 4 women.
Executions are conducted at a former hospital on the grounds of State
Correctional Institution Rockview in Centre County.
[source: Pa. Department of Corrections]
***
Adams said the 1-year delay in sentencing Parrish has been torturous.
"This is as the stomach turns. At least we're going into court and it's not
postponed," she said. "I want it to end (Monday). I just want him sentenced."
Adams said the delays have an impact that goes beyond her family.
"It impacts everybody's life that deals with domestic violence," Adams said. "I
wish people would write into the judge and tell him this is horrifying to us
all."
But Victoria Adam's father, Malcolm Adams, doesn't have faith that a death
penalty sentenced would be carried out.
"The special interest groups are going to jump all over it," he said of a
possible death sentence. "Even if they give him the sentence, I don't see it
happening," he said. "I don't feel like spending the next 20 years going back
and forth to court."
But he made his own wishes clear.
"My wish is that he doesn't get his wish."
(source: Pocono Record)
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