By Brian Stull, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 2:47pm
In Day 3 of the Velez hearing in Brownsville, Texas, I want to take a moment to explain the legal context – the rule of constitutional law – that will entitle Manuel Velez to relief if the judge, the Hon. Elia Cornejo Lopez, credits the facts presented.
The legal journey starts 50 years back with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Gideon v. Wainwright. There, the court held that the Constitution entitles poor people facing possible imprisonment counsel appointed at the state’s expense. In later decisions, the court clarified that a poor person’s right to appointed counsel is a right to effective counsel.
By Anna Arceneaux, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project at 3:44pm
In June 1993, Damien Echols, 18, Jason Baldwin, 16, and Jessie Misskelley, 17, who would come to be known as the “West Memphis Three,” were wrongfully arrested for the murders of three young boys in the small Arkansas town of West Memphis, just across the Tennessee border.
You may be familiar with HBO’s Paradise Lost three-part series on the case, which helped expose the gross injustices that led to the convictions against these three young men – and a death sentence against Damien – for crimes they did not commit. Now, a new, powerful documentary,West of Memphis, tells the story from the defense team’s perspective as the prosecution’s case against the three teenagers unravels.
By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 5:17pm
Friday morning, September 28th, Damon Thibodeaux woke up on Death Row. By early afternoon he was a free man, walking out of Louisiana State Penitentiary after 16 years imprisonment for a crime he did not commit. He was the 141st person exonerated after being sentenced to death.
Damon was my client for 14 years. I had visited him for many years, me the lawyer, him the client. Me in a suit, him in belly chains. On Friday, Damon my friend sat unencumbered in the front seat of my car as we drove away from the prison better known as “Angola” to the world outside and usually called “the farm” by its inhabitants. When the deputy warden and the guards at the front gate called him “Mr.” Thibodeaux and shook his hand, Damon replied, “Goodbye - hope we never meet again. No offense.”
This week, rather than acknowledge a growing mountain of evidence of racial bias in death penalty proceedings, especially in the selection of capital juries, the North Carolina House of Representatives chose to essentially gut the Racial Justice Act (RJA). Senate Bill 416, the so-called “Amend Death Penalty Procedures” makes it so that a judge may not make a finding of racial bias in the system based on statistical proof – as North Carolina Superior Court Judge Greg Weeks did just a few months ago in the first-ever ruling under the RJA.
By Denny LeBoeuf, Capital Punishment Project at 11:44am
After fifteen years on Louisiana's death row, Damon Thibodeaux was exonerated, the courts finally recognizing his innocence. He has moved to Minneapolis and is getting on with his life.
Damon's birthday and mine are two days apart, and for many years we would "celebrate" together while he was on death row. When I visit him this summer in Minneapolis to carry on our tradition, I expect we will have a MUCH better party.
By Tanya Greene, Advocacy and Policy Counsel, ACLU at 11:38am
Hooray for Maryland! Expressing concerns about the risk of deadly error, the exorbitant and ever-increasing cost, racial bias and the unending torment of murder victims' family members, today Maryland Governor, Martin O'Malley, signed into law repeal of that state's death penalty. We applaud the legislature and the Governor on their decision to end state-sponsored homicide in Maryland. We are a better nation for it.
Part of a noticeable trend – as Dr. King might say, the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice -- Maryland is the sixth state in six years to repeal the death penalty, joining New Jersey, New York, New Mexico, Illinois and Connecticut.
