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Death penalty

May 15, 2012
Human Rights Law Review Reveals Troubling Picture of Wrongful Execution
by Jeremy Leaming

With an increasing number of states dispensing with or reconsidering capital punishment, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review (HRLR) has released an exhaustive issue, which should push more state lawmakers to join the discussion. The HRLR issue provides compelling and highly troubling documentation of the likely wrongful 1989 Texas execution of Carlos DeLuna.

As Andrew Cohen writes for the Atlantic the HRLR’s issue, “an astonishing blend of narrative journalism, legal research, and gumshoe detective work,” should be read, especially by Justice Antonin Scalia, who in a 2006 concurrence staunchly defended the integrity of capital punishment cases, saying they are “given especially close scrutiny at every level ….”

Since being reinstituted in the United States, Texas has executed more inmates than all other states, except for California and Florida, where the death row populations are higher. In the last five years, however, five states have chosen to abolish capital punishment, with Connecticut the most recent. Californians in November will consider a ballot measure to end the death penalty.

HRLR’s issue called Los Tocayos Carlos, provides a stunning account of a criminal justice system gone terribly awry, with prosecutors, witnesses, judges all faltering in ways that tragically bungled a capital punishment case. While these officials and actors ignored evidence to the contrary, the likely perpetrator, Carlos Hernandez, continued a life of violent crime after DeLuna was convicted and sitting on death row.

In a press release about the report, Columbia Law School Professor James Liebman, and lead author of the issue, said, “Carlos DeLuna’s execution passed with little notice. No one cared enough about the defendant or the victim [Wanda Lopez stabbed to death working at a convenience mart in Corpus Christi] to make sure they caught the right guy. Everything that could go wrong in a death penalty case did go wrong for DeLuna. Sadly, DeLuna’s story is not unique. The very same factors that sent DeLuna to his death – faulty eyewitness testimony, shoddy legal representation, prosecutorial misfeasance – continue to put innocent people at risk of execution today.”

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Tags:
Death penalty, Supreme Court, Criminal Justice, Andrew Cohen, capital punishment, Carlos DeLuna, Columbia Human Rights Law Review, HRLR, Justice Antonin Scalia, Professor James Liebman
April 24, 2012
Calif. Set to Vote in November on Measure to Repeal Death Penalty
by Jeremy Leaming

Californians are set to engage in a high-profile debate over capital punishment, with an initiative to end the death penalty approved for the November ballot. The Los Angeles Times reports if the ballot measure passes “more than 700” death sentences would be commuted to life-without-parole sentences, making it that state’s “most severe form of criminal punishment.”

A coalition to replace the death penalty with a sentence of life in prison lauded the approval of the measure for the November ballot, calling the current system “broken, expensive,” and a danger to innocent people on death row. (Former L.A. County District Attorney Gil Garcetti told the Times that with more than 700 people on death row, there is a strong possibility that at least one innocent person is among the group. Garcetti is also a supporter of the campaign to repeal the state’s death penalty and replace it with the Savings, Accountability and Full Enforcement for California Act, or the SAFE California Act.)

Jeanne Woodford, former warden at San Quentin state prison and supporter of the SAFE California Act, said in a press statement, “Back in 1978 [when the state expanded its use of capital punishment], we did not have an alternative sentence that would keep convicted killers behind bars forever. We certainly did not know that we would spend $4 billion on 13 executions.”

The Los Angeles Times noted a three-year study of the state’s death penalty that concluded it cost “$183 million more to administer than life without possibility of parole, and that California’s 13 executions cost taxpayers $4 billion. The additional expense includes legal costs for expanded trials and appeals and for housing inmates in single cells.”

Fair and Unbalanced reports that “polls show California voters are ready to replace the death penalty, and join a nationwide trend.” If Californians vote to dump the death penalty, it will become the 18th state without capital punishment.

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Death penalty, Prison policy/incarceration, Criminal Justice, capital punishment, death row, Fair and Unbalanced, Gil Garcetti, Jeanne Woodford, Life Without Parole, SAFE, SAFE California Act
January 20, 2012
A Rare Win for Fairness Over Procedure in Capital Case
Guest Post

By Mary Schmid Mergler, senior counsel for The Constitution Project’s Criminal Justice Program. Mergler is the coauthor with Christopher Durocher of the recent ACS Issue Brief “The ‘Right-to-Counsel Term.’"

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court held in Maples v. Thomas that Alabama death row inmate Cory Maples was entitled to have his claims heard in federal court despite a previously missed filing deadline, because his counsel’s complete abandonment of him constituted grounds to excuse that missed filing. The Maples decision was a welcome one, as the triumph of fundamental fairness over procedure and technicalities in our criminal justice system has grown increasingly rare.

Cory Maples was convicted of murdering two acquaintances after a night of drug and alcohol use. His two court-appointed defense attorneys were inexperienced and ineffective. Their entire defense lasted about an hour. They failed to argue Maples’ obvious intoxication defense, and they failed to produce mitigating evidence of severe abuse that Maples had suffered as a child — the sort of evidence that often prevents juries from issuing a death sentence. In fact, the jury voted 10-2 to sentence Maples to death; a 9-3 vote would have meant life in prison.

Two lawyers from the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell (S&C) agreed to represent Maples pro bono during his state post-conviction appeals, since Alabama — virtually alone among death penalty states — provides no post-conviction counsel for death row inmates. A state court denied Maples’ initial habeas petition, triggering a filing deadline to appeal. However, prior to that decision, both of his pro bono attorneys had left S&C without providing the required notice to the court or Maples of their departure. When the notice of the denial and impending deadline arrived at S&C, no lawyer ever looked at it; a mailroom employee returned it, unopened, to the Alabama court clerk stamped “Returned to Sender—Attempted, Unknown.” The Alabama court clerk took no further action to ensure Maples or his counsel received notice. (There was a third attorney of record in the case, but as the Court’s opinion explains, he was only involved as local counsel to admit the S&C attorneys to practice in Alabama courts; he was completely uninvolved in the substance of the case.)

As a general rule, federal courts cannot consider claims of state prisoners in habeas proceedings when a state court has denied those claims based on independent and adequate state procedural grounds. So when Maples subsequently filed a federal habeas petition, the federal district court held that his failure to raise the claims in state court in a timely manner barred the federal court from considering them. Fortunately, an exception to this procedural bar exists if the petitioner can demonstrate “cause for the [procedural] default [in state court] and actual prejudice as a result of the alleged violation of federal law.” The Supreme Court’s opinion in Maples addressed the question of whether such “cause” existed in Maples’ case.

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Tags:
Access to Justice, Death penalty, Habeas corpus, Habeas corpus, Indigent defense, Supreme Court, Criminal Justice, Guest Post, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, Maples v. Thomas
December 12, 2011
Opponents of Death Penalty See Openings for Repeal
by Jeremy Leaming

Advocates for repealing the death penalty say there are hopeful signs that 2012 will see great progress toward their goal, Politico reports.

Efforts are underway in California, Kansas, Ohio, Maryland and Connecticut to dump the use of the death penalty. Politico notes, “Advocates say the coming year could be their best opportunity yet to replace the death penalty with life without the possibility of parole in these states, pointing to shifts in public opinion, rising concern over execution costs, Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber’s recent decision to place a moratorium on capital punishment, and Troy Davis’s high-profile execution galvanizing opposition to the death penalty.”

Diann Rust-Tierney, head of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, told Politico that Davis’s case helped spark greater attention to how states employ capital punishment. “That was a sad but stark example to folks of how broken the system is,” Rust-Tierney said.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said, “Any of those [state efforts] could succeed, but they’re all teed up for this coming year."

As Politico notes, the SAFE California Campaign, which is working to place an initiative before voters next year to abolish the death penalty, has cited the enormous costs – in the billions – of carrying out the death penalty in a state burdened with significant budgetary woes .

In a Dec. 2 guest post for ACSblog, Andrew Love, a death penalty lawyer in California, noted, “A study released by U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Arthur L. Alarcon found that California’s death penalty system is currently costing the state about $184 million per year. Further, ‘since reinstating the death penalty in 1978, California taxpayers have spent roughly $4 billion to fund a dysfunctional death penalty system that has carried out no more than 13 executions.'"

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Tags:
Death penalty, Criminal Justice, California, Connecticut, Diann Rust-Tierney, Kansas, Maryland, Ohio, Oregon, repeal of death penalty, Richard Dieter, SAFE California
December 2, 2011
Poster Child for California’s Broken Death Penalty
Guest Post

By Andrew Love, a death penalty lawyer in California and author of the blog Fair and Unbalanced, which originally published this post.

Death row inmate David Murtishaw died Tuesday of a heart attack. He was sentenced to death 32 years ago for the 1978 murder of three USC film students. Had the crime occurred just nine months earlier, before the re-institution of California's death penalty law, the enormous costs attendant to capital punishment, both financial and otherwise, would have been avoided.

The California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice (CCFAJ), after its extensive study of the state's death penalty system, concluded that with extremely rare exceptions, death sentences are unlikely ever to be carried out. Former Chief Justice Ronald George acknowledged this when he testified before the CCFAJ and described it as "dysfunctional." Indeed, the process for reviewing death sentences is “plagued with excessive delay” in the appointment of post-conviction counsel and a “severe backlog” in the Court’s review of appeals and habeas petitions. CCFAJ's report found that it would be excessively costly to even attempt to make the system workable. The reality is that California's death penalty is broken beyond repair.

David Murtishaw's is a case in point. Three trials. Three state appeals. Three state habeas petitions. One round of federal habeas proceedings. Thirty-two years under sentence of death only to die of a heart attack. (Since 1978, while there have been 13 executions, 55 condemned inmates have died from natural causes, 19 have committed suicide, six died from other causes.)
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Death penalty, Other courts, Prison policy/incarceration, Criminal Justice, Death Penalty, Guest Post

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