One of the greatest rappers of all-time, Rakim said: "it ain't where you're from/it's where you're at." This statement is magnified when discussing capital punishment. Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that "[e] veryone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration…no distinction shall be made on the basis of the …jurisdictional …territory to which a person belongs…"
When I was a younger man, George H.W. Bush launched many attacks against Michael Dukakis in the Presidential contest of 1988. In addition to the racism of the Willie Horton ad, King George I accused the Massachusetts Governor of being a card-carrying member of the ACLU. That seemed pretty cool to me so the first time I was able to vote in a general election, I voted for Dukakis.
Late last week, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals rejectedTroy Davis’s petition for a hearing to prove his innocence. Although seven of the nine non-police witnesses against him have recanted or contradicted their trial testimony, that evidence will not be heard unless the United States Supreme Court decides differently. Troy Davis still has a 30-day stay of execution to file a petition with the Supreme Court.
If a scientist were to testify that he saw a person commit a crime because he went to the scene in the Way Back Machine with Peabody and his pet boy Sherman, everyone would know it was untrue. Unfortunately, innocent people have been convicted of crimes based on science just as unbelievable as the Way Back Machine. Junk science and incompetent forensic technicians are at least two reasons that people are charged and convicted of crimes they did not commit.
Editor's Note: Jurist asked Christopher Hill, State Strategies Coordinator for the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project, to comment on Italy's recent abolition of the death penalty. The following is his response.
Italy's decision on March 3 to completely abolish capital punishment is yet more proof that the world is moving away from this ineffective and unjust system. There has not been an execution by a member of the Council of Europe in over 10 years, and 41 out of the 47 members of the Council of Europe have ratified Protocol No. 13 (PDF) to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which outlaws the use of the death penalty. Like many nations of the world, these 41 European nations recognize that the death penalty is a violation of human rights.
In July 2008, the ACLU's Capital Punishment Project Director John Holdridge was interviewed on Pacifica Radio about the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice report on the death penalty. John was interviewed with Bill Babbitt(PDF), whose brother Manny was executed by California in 1999.
They discussed how the death penalty in California is broken. There was also a discussion about the problems throughout the rest of the country.
In Franz Kafka’s novel, The Trial, the main character is prosecuted and executed for an unnamed crime. We like to think that this kind of absurd surrealism only happens in literature. But something similarly absurd is occurring in the U.S. death penalty system. Texas planned to execute Jeffery Wood tonight for murder even though he did not kill anyone nor did he intend that anyone be killed. He was not even in the building when the person he was convicted of killing was murdered. The fact that a judge has stayed his execution for last-minute assessment of his mental competency doesn't detract from the absurdity that he's still on death row.
Georgia will kill a man tonight. When it injects poison into the veins of William Earl Lynd, Georgia will end the longest period of time between executions since Furman v. Georgia.
A lot has happened since September 25, 2007, when Texas killed Michael Richard. There were many lessons to learn while we shut down the machinery of death. In fact, Richard's execution caused some controversy. The Supreme Court of the United States granted certiorari in the case of Baze v. Rees which started this de facto moratorium. Richard's lawyers tried to get a stay based on the Supreme Court hearing. Unfortunately, their computers had problems and they would not be able to file to necessary paperwork by 5:00 pm. When Richard's attorneys called the court to ask for 20 more minutes, the Hon. Sharon Keller, Chief Judge of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, told the lawyers the courthouse closes at 5:00 p.m. Richard was dead three hours later. We should have learned that there is an inherent cruelty in a system that can't wait for 20 minutes for a person to get access to the courts.
Last month, the Senate Criminal Justice Committee of the Texas Legislature held a hearing reviewing the newly reconstituted Texas Forensic Science Commission (FSC), a government agency that gathers information and reports on the use of science in criminal investigations. At the end of September, Gov. Rick Perry dismissed three members of the FSC days before they were scheduled to hear testimony by fire expert Dr. Craig Beyler on the accuracy of evidence presented in the Cameron Todd Willingham arson-murder case. Willingham was executed under Gov. Perry's watch in 2004, and reports indicate information calling into question the arson evidence was given to the governor before the execution. Gov. Perry's dismissal of the FSC members has delayed review of this and two other cases, quite possibly until well after the March primary.
The commission was set to hear testimony today from an arson expert it had hired, Craig L. Beyler, who reviewed the “expert” arson testimony used in 1992 to convict Cameron Todd Willingham of killing his three children by setting their house on fire. In a detailed report (PDF), Beyler recently criticized the “expert” arson opinions used to convict Willingham as "nothing more than a collection of personal beliefs that have nothing to do with science-based fire investigation." Beyler’s conclusions, which echo the findings of eight forensic arson specialists who have looked at the case, make it abundantly clear that Willingham, executed by the State of Texas in 2004 under Gov. Perry’s watch, was almost certainly innocent.
