Group says 16 executed in U.S. were probably innocent
By John Aloysius Farrell
October 25, 2000
WASHINGTON -- The American system of capital punishment has taken the lives of 16 men despite "compelling evidence of their innocence," according to a report by death penalty foes scheduled to be released Thursday.
"Courts overwhelmingly favored procedure over justice and efficiency over fairness," the report by Equal Justice USA contends. "In doing so, state and federal governments sanctioned the state killing of men who were probably innocent."
The report is the product of a grass-roots investigation project, in which anti-death penalty activists in several states conducted research into cases where there were doubts about an executed inmate's guilt. The individual state researchers then forwarded their findings to Equal Justice, a liberal public-interest group that sponsored the survey.
Supporters of the death penalty reacted with skepticism to news of the report.
"Every prosecutor's worst nightmare is that an innocent person could be executed," said Joshua K. Marquis, an Oregon district attorney who serves as a spokesman for the National District Attorneys' Association.
"It takes 10 or 12 or 14 years for these cases to get through the courts, and rightfully so," said Marquis. "We could always do a better job, but the idea that people are regularly being clapped into death row after being represented at their trials by drunken lawyers six months out of law school is a reality that doesn't exist. It may have at one time, but it does not exist now."
The Equal Justice report introduces no new evidence in the 16 cases -- no new forensic or DNA tests or witness recantations -- but instead tracks each case through the state and federal court systems from the day of the crime to the day of the execution, raising questions at various stages about the accuracy and fairness of the process.
The report cites the case of Larry Griffin, for example, who was executed by the state of Missouri in 1995. A major part of the prosecution's case was the testimony of one eyewitness -- a Boston hoodlum with a lengthy criminal record named Bobby Fitzgerald.
Fitzgerald was living a new life in the federal witness protection program, after testifying against his former criminal associates in Boston, when he happened to observe a drive-by shooting in St. Louis. He identified Griffin from a police photo lineup.
The jury at Griffin's trial was told almost nothing about Fitzgerald's criminal record and history as a government witness, or that he was being held by St. Louis authorities on fresh charges of credit card fraud. After Fitzgerald testified, the prosecution agreed to settle the credit card case with no further jail time. Fitzgerald later recanted much of his testimony.
Though Griffin had a motive -- the victim was a drug dealer who was said to have shot Griffin's brother -- there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime.
Griffin's lawyer was just a few years out of law school, and had never tried a murder case. Another federally protected witness from a federal racketeering trial later identified three other men as the killers.
"This report represents only a small number of the actual cases in which people have been executed for crimes they probably did not commit," the Equal Justice organization said.
The Equal Justice report, which was compiled by Maine writer and activist Claudia Whitman, cites incompetent and poorly paid defense attorneys; prosecutorial and police misconduct; racial bias and judicial timidity as the prime failures of the death penalty system.
The executed men identified as innocent are Brian K. Baldwin, Cornelius Singleton and Freddie Lee Wright of Alabama; Thomas M. Thompson of California; James Adams, Willie Darden and Jesse Tafero of Florida; Girvies Davis of Illinois; Griffin and Roy Roberts of Missouri; Odell Barnes, Robert N. Drew, Gary Graham, Richard W. Jones and Frank B. McFarland of Texas; and Roger K. Coleman of Virginia.
http://www.truthinjustice.org/prob-innocent.htmThe Death Penalty is Arbitrary and Unfair
No system in which fallible human beings decide the fate of other human beings can be free from some degree of arbitrariness and error.
"Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all, and, despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake." - Justice Harry A. Blackmun, February 22, 1994
"Race, ethnic origin and economic status appear to be key determinants of who will, and who will not, receive a death sentence" in the United States. - UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions, 1997
The death penalty in the USA is arbitrary and unfair because:
Ninety-five percent of death row inmates cannot afford their own attorney. Poor people are often subjected to convictions and death sentences that equally or more culpable, but more affluent, people do not receive.
Prosecutors seek the death penalty far more frequently when the victim of the homicide is white than when the victim is black or of another ethnic origin.
Co-defendants charged with committing the same crime often receive different punishments, where one defendant may receive a death sentence while another receives prison time.
Individual prosecutors make their own decisions about when to seek a death sentence, so that where the crime has been committed often determines the punishment.
Only a small percentage of the people convicted of crimes for which the death penalty is a possibility actually receive a death sentence. Two people who commit similar capital crimes may receive drastically different punishments.
"Almost all people accused of death-eligible crimes are impoverished and must rely on court-appointed lawyers to defend them at trial…there is an ever-present risk that minority defendants may be represented by lawyers who are not only incompetent, but also openly bigoted." - Killing with Prejudice: Race and the Death Penalty in the USA Amnesty International Report, May 20, 1999
http://www.amnestyusa.org/abolish/arbitraryandunfair.htmlAll this aside, the mere possibility of killing an innocent being killed is enough. A fallible system cannot be intrusted with irreversible action when there is a resonable alternative. Prision guards are willing to take risks to protect innocents. Why can this not extend to a smallish increse in risk in oreder to prevent innocents being exucuted.