Oct. 24
TENNESSEE:
The most broken system in Tennessee
Need a reason to be against the death penalty?
How about a dozen?
1. It's not reliable.
Since 1973, a long line of death row inmates have been exonerated, their
innocence discovered years after their capital trial, meaning that what needs
to be our purest, most trusted system of justice is our most flawed: We have
imprisoned innocent people and, more than likely, executed them, as well.
Last year, the 156th inmate was set free.
"And those are just the ones we know about," Ray Krone told the Times Free
Press.
In 2002, Krone became the 100th exoneree. Sentenced to die in Arizona for a
crime he didn't commit, Krone was later released after DNA evidence proved his
innocence. He now lives in Tennessee. With Sister Helen Prejean, Krone
co-founded Witness to Innocence.
2. The death penalty is applied in unconstitutional ways.
Instead of being used in a majority of American courtrooms, death penalty
sentencing only happens in approximately 2 % of all counties, according to the
Death Penalty Information Center.
Such geographical arbitrariness - how can we have a system of justice that 98 %
of all counties ignore? - makes it unusual, unequal and, many argue,
unconstitutional.
3. Death row is a place of poverty.
"Almost all death row inmates could not afford their own attorney at trial,"
Amnesty International reports. "Court-appointed attorneys often lack the
experience necessary for capital trials and are overworked and underpaid."
"From the U.S. to Iran, the single most common demographic amongst those on
death row is poverty," adds Jack Todd in Borgen magazine.
4. Death row is racist.
"More than 1/2 of the people on death row in this country are people of color,"
reports the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala.
If the murder victim is white, there's a greater chance death row sentencing
will take place, especially if the accused is black. Blacks are less than 15
percent of the U.S. population, yet more than 40 percent of the nearly 3,000
death row inmates.
Of the 63 males on Tennessee's death row, 30 are black.
"35 % of those executed since 1976 have been black," states the EJI.
A growing body of research illustrates the connection between the death penalty
and lynching. As lynching became taboo and outlawed, the practice morphed into
a legal version of itself: death row. If lynch-happy counties couldn't hang a
black man anymore, they could legally sentence him to die in prison.
Between the 1870s and 1950s, Shelby County, Tenn., had one of the highest rates
of lynchings in the South, according to the EJI.
Today, the majority of inmates on Tennessee's death row - 27 of 64 - come from
Shelby County.
6. It's a money pit.
California has spent $4 billion on its death penalty system since 1976,
according to DPIC. A North Carolina study shows death row trials cost $2
million more than life-without-parole trials.
With 64 inmates, how many millions is Tennessee's death row costing each year?
7. By shifting sentencing from death to life without parole, all that money
could be spent elsewhere.
- Funding addiction programs.
- Aiding victims' families.
- Staffing prisons.
- Boosting police training to diagnose and aid the mentally ill.
A new coalition, Tennessee Alliance for the Severe Mental Illness Exclusion, is
building support among communities, legislators and law enforcement on ways to
exclude the mentally ill from death row sentencing.
8. Less than 1/2 of all Americans favor the death penalty, according to Pew
Research.
9. Executions are at historic lows.
10. Research shows the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to crime.
11. The death penalty is hollow justice.
Victims' families wait years, if not decades, for an execution that sometimes
never comes. Life without parole provides closure in a way the death penalty
process does not.
12. Killing our own citizens is a bizarre and bloodthirsty practice at odds
with democratic America.
"I believe the system is a disaster on every level," said the Rev. Stacy
Rector. "It's falling apart."
Rector, a Presbyterian minister, is the executive director of Tennesseans
Against the Death Penalty. Thursday evening, she will join a diverse panel -
from conservatives to former cops - each of whom believes the death penalty in
Tennessee ought to be abolished:
- Amy Lawrence, with Tennessee Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty.
- Marc Easley, former Chattanooga police officer who's working with TASMIE.
(And is one of the most powerful speakers I've heard).
- Krone, the 100th exoneree, whose story alone - which he'll tell - is reason
enough.
(source: David Cook, Opinion; Times Free Press)
CALIFORNIA:
California Prop 62 would repeal the death penalty. A lifer says it doesn't go
far enough.
California Proposition 62, which would abolish the state's rarely enforced
death penalty, effectively condemns the 741 residents of death row to something
worse: the grinding, hopeless death of life without the possibility of parole
(LWOP) inside California's broken, dysfunctional prison system. The plain
language of the proposed law is neither ambiguous nor complex: "Violent
murderers who are sentenced to serve life in prison without the possibility of
parole in California are never eligible for parole. They spend the rest of
their lives in prison and they die in prison."
What's accomplished by this initiative is merely changing the method of
execution. No less a moral authority than Pope Francis has called LWOP terms of
imprisonment "hidden death sentences."
Proposition 62 goes on to condemn us lifers to serve out the remainder of our
sentences in "high security" prisons. These are the same prisons found to
constitute cruel and unusual punishment by a conservative-leaning majority of
the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Plata. Prisons with extraordinarily high
suicide rates, with substandard medical, dental, and mental health care, and
with scant rehabilitative programs. Prisons rife with gang violence, racism,
and despair. A cruel if not unusual enough death, to be sure.
The experience of serving LWOP is a subject I know all too well, and about
which I've published tens of thousands of words. Over the years, I've tried to
describe the indescribable. The sense of being dead while you're still alive,
the feeling of being dumped into a deep well struggling to tread water until,
some 40 or 50 years later, you drown.
In 1980, after a 2-day trial that seemed to bore my public defender, a Los
Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled that I was irredeemable, that my
life, at the age of 19 years, was forfeit. I had admitted to the crime of
killing Thomas Allen Fellowes in a drunken, drugged-up fistfight, and I was
ready to be punished. Frankly, if anyone had asked me then, I probably would
have agreed with the judge's assessment of my character and my prospects.
But neither of us could have foreseen the course of my life over the next 36
years. Dirk Van Zyl Smit, Professor of Comparative and International Penal Law
at Nottingham University, England, a world authority on life sentences and a
harsh critic of LWOP sentences in particular, has described them as "covenants
with the past." They are just that:, a triumph of what happened then over
anything that might be happening now.
I believe I have proven that the judgment from then is wrong now. I also
believe that the vast majority of the thousands of men and women serving LWOP
have done the same. As a leader in the movement to end LWOP, I've been privy to
countless stories of transformations, acts of service and charity, and deep
conversions from all over the country.
LWOP sentences, however, forever deny the humanity of prisoners, locking them
into the worst moments of their lives.
Somewhere along the way, the death penalty abolitionist movement latched onto
the idea that they could market a hardened version of LWOP as a "reasonable
alternative" to the gas chamber and, later, lethal injection. On the ACLU's
website, someone looking for guidance on this crucial civil rights issue during
the last repeal campaign in 2012 would have found the following language urging
a yes vote:
"Spending even a small amount of time in California's overcrowded, dangerous
prisons is not pleasant. Spending thirty years there, growing sick and old, and
dying there, is a horrible experience.... Prisoners condemned to die in prison
are not given any special treatment and, in fact, have less access to programs
than other prisoners. They are housed in high security facilities with few
privileges, far away from any relatives, and in crowded group cells.
Ironically, people on death row are provided much more comfortable single cells
and sometimes gain celebrity and attention just by being there."
This kind of logic had 2 predictable side effects: It served to legitimize the
sentence with the imprimatur of liberal civil rights defenders, and it began a
flood of LWOP-sentenced prisoners.
According to The Sentencing Project, LWOP is now the fastest-growing form of
life sentence in the United States. There are more than 50,000 LWOP sentenced
prisoners nationwide, compared to a total of about 3,000 under a traditional
death sentence. With the reassurance and support of civil rights groups that
advocate for the deadly trade-off, the numbers continue to grow.
Why not abolish the death penalty and life without the chance of parole? The
assumption would be that it is possible for human beings to become better than
their worst act. It does not mean that all prisoners would succeed. Some
wouldn't try hard enough, some wouldn't be able to make the requisite changes
to satisfy a skeptical parole board and an elected governor's review, and some
small percentage would continue to present an unreasonable risk to the public.
No one, however, would be denied all hope.
Here's another important consequence of converting death row inmates to lifers
without a chance of parole: death row prisoners are entitled (at least in
theory) to additional appeals and better quality attorneys. Many falsely
convicted death row prisoners have been exonerated over the past decade. One of
the tricks of LWOP is that it operates under the legal fiction of not being a
death sentence, therefore there are no additional appeals, no better quality
attorneys, and no higher level of scrutiny. (This is probably the main reason
many death row prisoners, who live on hope for an appellate rescue, have
opposed ballot measures like Prop 62.)
Death penalty abolitionists generally ask the same two questions. "If we don't
offer LWOP as an alternative, how can we get the public to end the death
penalty?" And, "If not LWOP, what will be done with the worst of the worst"?
The facts are clear on the use of the death penalty - the vast majority of the
world has abandoned it. Virtually every religious leader has condemned it. The
United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights, the International Criminal
Court, and every human rights organization on the planet opposes the death
penalty. The truth is the death penalty is rapidly being swept into the dustbin
of history along with so many other old, bad ideas.
In our peer group of democracies, there are maximum terms of imprisonment, even
for murder. Of course, they reserve ways to extend imprisonment in those
extremely rare cases where it's necessary; but the assumption is it isn't
necessary unless proven otherwise.
The answer to what to do to the so-called worst of the worst without LWOP is
even easier, because California has real-world experience. From 1967, when the
Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, to 1978, when California voters
restored it, the punishment for 1st degree murder was 7 years to life.
Notorious examples like Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan are still serving life
with the possibility of parole. Contrary to the claims of death penalty
supporters and opponents, the Board of Parole Hearings is extremely stingy with
findings of suitability for parole. And it's important to note that the small
number of released murderers have the lowest rate of recidivism of all
parolees. According to the California Department of Corrections and
Rehabilitation 2011 Adult Institutions Outcome Evaluations Report, 860
convicted murders were released between 1995 and 2011. 5 were returned to
prison; none for murder, attempted murder, or assault and battery. That's a
total recidivism rate of less than 1 %.
Trading lethal injection executions for lethal terms of imprisonment does not
end the death penalty, and this lie needs to be rejected. Life without the
possibility of parole is the death penalty, pure and simple. There are ways to
fix the system for life-term prisoners that protect victims, provide actual
justice to all, and uphold the better values of our state. Prop 62 is not one
of them.
(source: Kenneth E. Hartman has served more than 36 years of a life without the
possibility of parole sentence in the California prison system. He is the
Executive Director of The Other Death Penalty Project, a nationwide,
grassroots, nonprofit organization of prisoners opposed to "all forms of the
death penalty."----themarshallproject.org)
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