This is certainly an issue on which we will all never agree. My question is this -- do you think that it is okay to execute innocent people? The fact is, poor people often get stuck with bad attorneys, because they think that anything is better than a public defender (which is not the case) and end up hiring any fool who will take their case for the least amount of money. These attorneys in many cases do a terrible job. Please don't think that people appealing death sentences are all a bunch of hardened criminals who are trying to use crafty legal techniques to avoid the death penalty. That is not the case most of the time. When it comes right down to it, YOU could be picked up off the street, taken into a police station, tortured, beaten, suffocated and then you confess so that the abuse will stop, and then you could end up being sentenced to death for something you didn't do. It happens all the time.
Also, police lie and abuse the system -- not in all cases, of course, but police do lie. I had a police officer lie, under oath, when I was in court on a traffic ticket -- he lied, but I had photographs to prove my case, and ended up winning.
Here's some food for thought --
From
http://www.amnesty-usa.org/abolish/factsinnocence.html
Because the death penalty system is administered by human beings, and because human beings are fallible, innocent people may have been executed in the past and will continue to be executed in the future.
Michael Radelet, Hugo Adam Bedau, and Constance E. Putnam report that 350 people have been wrongfully convicted of capital or potentially capital crimes in America since 1900. Of these, 23 were executed. (In Spite of Innocence, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1992.)
Between 1973 and 2001, 98 people in 22 States have been released from death rows across the USA after evidence of their wrongful convictions emerged.
In January 2001, the case against Peter Limone has been officially dropped by the state of Massachusetts, 33 years after being convicted and sentenced. Joseph Barboza, the main witness against the four men admitted that he had fabricated much of his testimony.
In October 2000, Earl Washington received a full pardon following DNA testing that exonerated him of a rape and murder charge for which he had spent 17 years in prison in Virginia. Washington, who suffers from mental retardation, came within one week of execution in 1985. In 1993, his death sentence was commuted to life. He remains in prison on unrelated charges.
In March 2000, Joseph Nahume Green became the 87th person exonerated since 1973. He was acquitted of the murder for which he spent seven years on Florida's death row.
In January 2000, Steve Manning became the 13th defendant exonerated in Illinois when prosecutors announced that they were dropping all charges against him and no longer planned to retry him for the murder for which he had been convicted.
The exoneration of the 13 Illinois death row inmates led Governor George Ryan to declare a moratorium on executions in the State of Illinois.
"I don't think an execution will ever happen again while I'm governor. I'd rather err on that side."
-George H. Ryan, Governor of Illinois
In September 1999, Charles Munsey died in a North Carolina prison. He had been imprisoned for six years and sentenced to death for a crime to which another man confessed. Shortly before his death, Munsey had won a new trial.
Factors leading to wrongful convictions include:
Inadequate defense
Police and Prosecutorial misconduct
Perjured testimony and mistaken eyewitness testimony
Racial Prejudice
Tainted jailhouse testimony
Suppression of mitigating evidence and misinterpretation of evidence
Community pressure
_____
From the Chicago Tribune articles --
Illinois has claimed the dubious distinction of having exonerated as many Death Row inmates as it has executed. But many of the circumstances that sent 12 innocent men to Death Row have been documented by the Tribune in numerous other capital cases.
In the first comprehensive examination of all 285 death-penalty cases since capital punishment was restored in Illinois 22 years ago, the Tribune has identified numerous fault lines running through the criminal justice system, subverting the notion that when the stakes are the highest, trials should be fail-safe.
The findings reveal a system so plagued by unprofessionalism, imprecision and bias that they have rendered the state's ultimate form of punishment its least credible.
The Tribune investigation, which included an exhaustive analysis of appellate opinions and briefs, trial transcripts and lawyer disciplinary records, as well as scores of interviews with witnesses, attorneys and defendants, has found that:
- At least 33 times, a defendant sentenced to die was represented at trial by an attorney who has been disbarred or suspended--sanctions reserved for conduct so incompetent, unethical or even criminal the lawyer's license is taken away.
In Kane County, an attorney was suspended for incompetence and dishonesty. Ten days after getting his law license back in 1997, he was appointed by the county's chief judge to defend a man's life.
- In at least 46 cases where a defendant was sentenced to die, the prosecution's evidence included a jailhouse informant--a form of evidence so historically unreliable that some states have begun warning jurors to treat it with special skepticism.
In one Cook County case, the word of a convicted con man, called a "pathological liar" by federal authorities, put a man on Death Row. In exchange for a sharply reduced sentence, the con artist testified that while in jail together the defendant confessed to him, even though a tape recording of their conversation contains no confession.
- In at least 20 cases where a defendant was sentenced to die, the prosecution's case included a crime lab employee's visual comparison of hairs--a type of forensic evidence that dates to the 19th Century and has proved so notoriously unreliable that its use is now restricted or even barred in some jurisdictions outside Illinois.
- At least 35 times, a defendant sent to Death Row was black and the jury that determined guilt or sentence all white--a racial composition that prosecutors consider such an advantage that they have removed as many as 20 African-Americans from a single trial's jury pool to achieve it. The U.S. Constitution forbids racial discrimination during jury selection, but courts have enforced that prohibition haltingly.
- Forty percent of Illinois' death-penalty cases are characterized by at least one of the above elements. Sometimes, all of the elements appear in a single case. Dennis Williams, who is black, was sentenced to die by an all-white Cook County jury; prosecuted with evidence that included a jailhouse informant and hair comparison; and defended, none too well, by an attorney who was later disbarred.
Williams and three other men--referred to as the Ford Heights Four--were wrongly convicted of the 1978 murders of a south suburban couple. Williams served 18 years, almost all on Death Row, before he was cleared by DNA evidence in 1996. He then filed a lawsuit accusing sheriff's officers of framing him.
"The feeling is emotionally choking," Williams said of being sentenced to die for a crime he did not commit. "It's inhuman. It's something that shouldn't be imaginable. Here are people who are supposed to uphold the law who are breaking it."
Illinois houses its condemned inmates at the Menard and Pontiac correctional centers and at the new prison in Downstate Tamms. They spend 23 hours a day in cells so narrow they can touch opposite walls at the same time.
_____
To win a death sentence, prosecutors in Illinois have repeatedly exaggerated the criminal backgrounds of defendants--turning misdemeanors into felonies, manslaughter into murder, innocence into guilt.
Prosecutors have lied to jurors, raising the possibility of parole when no such possibility existed.
They also have browbeaten jurors, saying they must return the death sentence, or they will have violated their oaths and lied to God.
_____
For police and prosecutors, few pieces of evidence close a case better than a confession. After all, juries place a remarkable degree of faith in confessions; few people can imagine suspects would admit guilt if they were innocent. But, in Illinois, confessions have proved faulty.
Howard's case, his lawyers say, may be one example. As in many of the other Burge cases that resulted in a death sentence, without a confession there is little evidence against Howard--certainly no physical evidence, such as fingerprints, and no weapon. And in the years since Howard's trial, new information that could help reverse his conviction has emerged.
Criminal suspects frequently realize the damage they have done to themselves by confessing, then falsely claim that the police abused them. But what separate many of the Burge cases from others, and what make the accusations so troublesome, are their rich detail and numbing repetitiveness.
A federal judge and the Illinois Appellate Court have made rulings that, in often harsh language, suggest the alleged abuse under Burge warrants additional investigation and threatens to taint trial verdicts.
"It is now common knowledge," U.S. District Judge Milton Shadur wrote in one Death Row inmate's appeal in March, "that in the early- to mid-1980s, Chicago Police Cmdr. Jon Burge and many of the officers working under him regularly engaged in the physical abuse and torture of prisoners to extract confessions."
Citing internal police accounts, lawsuits and appeals, Shadur said that torture occurred as an "established practice, not just on an isolated basis."
Burge was fired from the department in 1993 for torture in one case. Reached at his Florida home, he declined to comment.
Police tactics scrutinized
Charges of police misconduct--from manufacturing evidence to concealing information that could help clear suspects--are central to at least half of the 12 Illinois cases where a man sentenced to death was exonerated.
In two of those cases, neither of which is linked to Burge or his detectives, men whose confessions put them on Death Row were cleared and set free.
Ronald Jones had long claimed he confessed to the 1985 murder and rape of a South Side woman only because Chicago police beat him repeatedly. After nearly eight years on Death Row, he was exonerated by DNA evidence earlier this year.
Gary Gauger claimed his unsigned confession to the 1993 murders of his parents in rural McHenry County was the product of coercion by sheriff's detectives who questioned Gauger for some 21 hours until he broke down and agreed to a scenario the detectives suggested.