The state of Ohio tried to execute Alva Campbell on Nov. 15. They failed to do so.

Mr. Campbell committed a heinous crime in 1997, murdering 18-year-old Charles Dials during a carjacking. Twenty years later, the 69-year-old Campbell has many serious illnesses, including lung cancer, COPD, and respiratory failure. He has had prostate cancer and a hip replacement. He needs daily oxygen treatments, uses a walker, and also has a colostomy bag.  These health issues were news to no one.  The officials overseeing the attempted execution even propped Mr. Campbell up on a pillow so he could breathe more easily as they tried to kill him.  After many unsuccessful attempts to find a vein to begin the lethal injection process, the process was stopped. His new execution date has been set for June 5, 2019, that is if he lives that long. But the problems with the nation’s execution protocols, as disturbing as they are, are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the death penalty system’s ongoing problems.

The U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) has the opportunity to finally end this failed experiment of the death penalty. Forty-five years ago, SCOTUS temporarily struck down the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia. Now the court could decide to consider the case of Arizona death row inmate Abel Daniel Hidalgo, who is challenging the constitutionality of our nation’s death penalty because it continues to be as arbitrarily applied as it was in 1972.

Laurence H. Tribe, the Carl M. Loeb University Professor and professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard University, recently submitted an op-ed to The Washington Post outlining his belief that the time has come for the court to act, writing, “After more than 40 years of experimenting with capital punishment, it is time to recognize that we have found no way to narrow the death penalty so that it applies only to the “worst of the worst.” It also remains prone to terrible errors and unacceptable arbitrariness. The Hidalgo case exemplifies the problems with our current capital punishment regimes, problems that several Supreme Court justices have expressed interest in addressing. It also presents these constitutional problems cleanly, without the procedural obstacles that sometimes dissuade  justices from hearing important constitutional cases. Instead of continuing, in the words of Justice Harry A. Blackmun, to “tinker with the machinery of death,” the court should hold the death penalty unconstitutional nationwide.”

Tinkering with the machinery of death is what this nation has been doing since 1972. From start to finish, the death penalty system is broken. It is time to end it.

Picture and additional article

On October 12th, Texas executed a condemned man. The day before, Arkansas set one free.

Robert Pruett was sentenced to 99 years for a 1995 murder under Texas’ infamous “law of parties.” This controversial law states that anyone who “solicits, encourages, directs, aids, or attempts to aid” a person who commits a crime is equally liable no matter how small a role he or she plays in that crime. In 1995, a man with a long prison record stabbed his neighbor to death outside his home. Mr. Pruett was present at the murder. The killer was Mr. Pruett’s father. Pruett himself was only 15 at the time.

While in prison at age 20, Mr. Pruett was accused of killing Correctional Officer Daniel Nagle and sentenced to death. He maintained his  innocence until his execution last week. His conviction relied largely on the testimony of other inmates, who allegedly made deals in exchange for their testimony. There was no physical evidence connecting Pruett to the murder. When the murder weapon was tested for forensic evidence, the test was inconclusive.

The day before Pruett’s execution, Texas’ neighbor Arkansas (a state which executed four men in 10 days this spring) quietly released Rickey Dale Newman from the state’s death row. Mr. Newman is now the 160th exonerated death row inmate in this country since 1973, spending nearly 17 years in custody for the 2001 murder of a transient woman in a “hobo park” on the outskirts of Van Buren, Arkansas.

Newman had a severe mental illness at the time of the crime. A former Marine with major depression, chronic posttraumatic stress disorder from childhood abuse, and an IQ in the intellectually disabled range, he was homeless when Marie Cholette was murdered. He was convicted and sentenced to death in June 2002 after a one-day trial in which the court permitted him to represent himself.

There was no physical evidence linking him to the murder. A prosecution expert falsely testified that a hair found on Newman’s clothing belong to Ms. Cholette. Mr. Newman also told the jury that he was guilty and should be executed. He went on to drop all his appeals. Just four days before he was scheduled to die in 2005, he allowed his federal public defenders to seek a stay of execution in order to test DNA evidence on the blanket in which the victim was found as well as the hair that was used to convict him. The DNA didn’t match. The attorneys also discovered that the prosecutors withheld crucial evidence from the murder scene that contradicted Mr. Newman’s account. A later federal court hearing uncovered that the state mental health doctor had made errors in the administration and scoring of the tests given to Mr. Newman pretrial to determine his mental competency.

Christian author and activist Shane Claiborne tweeted, “As Robert Pruett was being executed in Texas, Rickey Newman was being exonerated in Arkansas. It is a reminder that for every 9 executions, there’s been 1 exoneration. That’s not a good record. Can you imagine if 1 out of every 10 airplanes crashed?”

It defies logic that we as a society find these kind of statistics acceptable when an individual’s life is on the line. With alternative sentences available, why do we keep taking these risks when we know how flawed the system is?

How many of these cases do we have to read about before we decide the number is too high?  1 out of 10. Enough already.

Picture of Rickey Dale Newman from the Arkansas Times

Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) Founder and Capital Defense Attorney Bryan Stevenson appeared on CBS News last week following the recent events in Charlottesville. He addressed the long and pernicious history of white supremacy in our nation and the continued resistance of too many white Americans to name that history. He reminds listeners we first must be willing to speak and reckon with the truth of this history and its impact on our present if we ever hope to move toward reconciliation as a country. The events in Charlottesville are an “in our face” reminder of the warped ideology of white supremacy and how that ideology manifests itself, not only in the terrifying spectacle of angry white people with torches marching through the streets and running over protestors, but also in the very heart of our criminal justice system and the death penalty.

Marcellus Williams is a black man in Missouri whose execution is scheduled for today, August 22. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 2001 by a nearly all-white jury in the highly publicized stabbing death of a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Felicia Gayle. After having previously been granted a stay of execution in 2015 to permit DNA testing in his case, the Missouri Supreme Court on August 15 denied Mr. Williams a new stay of execution, despite recently obtained results of that testing that support his innocence claim.

Mr. Williams and his attorneys have presented scientific evidence that excludes his DNA from that found on the murder weapon and have filed a motion in the state court to stay his scheduled August 22 execution. Reports by two DNA experts support his petition that the DNA evidence on the knife does not match Williams or Gayle, but comes from an unknown third person. The petition states that the “physical evidence collected from the crime scene”—which includes fingernail scrapings from the victim, who had been stabbed more than 40 times—“did not match and could not be linked to” Williams.” His lawyer plans to seek review in the U.S. Supreme Court stating, “It certainly would give most reasonable people pause to say, ‘Should you be executing somebody when you’ve got reasonable evidence suggesting another man did it?'”

Mr. Williams had also previously raised a claim alleging that St. Louis County prosecutors had a practice of striking black prospective jurors, including six of the seven African Americans it had the opportunity to empanel in his case. A Missouri Supreme Court Justice noted in another St. Louis County capital case “a fairly repetitive pattern” in which St. Louis County “has a substantial African-American community” yet there are “still all white juries and that’s not mathematically probable.” This issue was presented to the U.S. Supreme Court in Herbert Smulls’s death-penalty case in 2014, but the Court declined to review the issue, and Smulls was executed.

In May 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the conviction and sentence of Georgia death row inmate, Timothy Foster, based on the racial bias in the jury selection process for his trial. In the jury selection process, the prosecution struck all of the potential African American jurors from the jury, a practice which is unconstitutional but hard to prove. After seating an all-white jury in the case, the prosecution urged them to sentence Foster to death to “deter other people out there in the projects.” The jury obliged and gave Foster the death sentence. In 2006, the Southern Center for Human Rights obtained the prosecution’s notes from jury selection in Foster’s 1987 trial. The notes eliminated any doubt that the strikes were based on race.

A 2010 review of the jury selection process in eight Southern states (including Tennessee) by EJI found evidence of racial discrimination in jury selection in every one of those states; a 2012 North Carolina study found eligible black jurors struck at twice the rate of whites; and a 2003 Louisiana study found it was three times the rate.

And there is the case of Duane Buck in Texas. The U.S Supreme court recently determined that Buck’s trial lawyers were ineffective when they introduced testimony from a psychologist suggesting that he was more likely to be dangerous — and thus more deserving of a death sentence — because he is black.

Then we have McCleskey vs. Kemp, decided on April 22, 1987, a case widely regarded as the last broad constitutional challenge to the death penalty. Warren McCleskey, a black man, was sentenced to death in Georgia for murdering a white police officer, Frank Schlatt. A highly regarded study by professor David Baldus revealed that death sentences in the state were significantly more likely in white-victim murder cases than in comparable black-victim murders. These racial effects were especially pronounced in cases like McCleskey’s, where the defendant was black and the victim white.

Such sentencing disparity continues with overwhelming evidence that those who are convicted or murdering someone who is white are far more likely to receive the death penalty than those who are convicted of killing people of color. Nationally, over 75% of the murder victims in cases resulting in an execution were white, even though nationally only 50% of murder victims generally are white. A study conducted on capital sentencing in Tennessee from 1981-2000 found that defendants with white victims were 3.15 times more likely to receive the death penalty than defendants with black victims (ABA’s Tennessee Death Penalty Assessment Report, 2007).

In a 5-4 ruling, the justices dismissed the constitutional significance of the documented racial disparities. Justice Lewis Powell’s majority opinion reasoned that McCleskey had not proven that the prosecutor or jury in his own case had been influenced by race. Though he did make the assumption that the Baldus study findings were accurate, Justice Powell still concluded that even if the results appeared unfair, that did not mean McCleskey’s sentence was disproportionate to the crime in violation of the Constitution. Justice Powell conceded that “[a]pparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.”

Written over the doors of the U.S. Supreme Court building are the words “Equal Justice Under the Law,” reminding everyone who enters there the standard to which we hold our highest court. And still, Warren McCleskey was executed because racial bias is “inevitable” and apparently acceptable. Except it is not. The work for racial truth-telling and healing in our nation will take painful conversations, listening, commitment, and action and that will take years to accomplish. Those on death row don’t have that kind of time. With the overhwhelming evidence of racial bias infecting the death penalty system today, it must end now. There is no other way forward.

Watch Bryan Stevenson here.

Sign the Petition to Spare Marcellus Williams.

On July 7, Virginia executed William Morva for the 2006 murders of hospital security guard Derrick McFarland and sheriff’s deputy Cpl. Eric Sutphin after Morva escaped from custody. Morva’s execution came hours after Virginia’s Democratic governor Terry McCauliffe announced he would not grant clemency despite pressure from mental health advocates, state lawmakers, and attorneys who said Morva’s crimes were the result of serious mental illness, though the jury never heard about its severity.

Meanwhile, the state of Texas continues to try to kill Scott Panetti, institutionalized at least a dozen times because of his severe mental illness, who murdered his estranged in-laws in 1992. Panetti was allowed to represent himself at trial, wearing a purple bandana around his neck, a cowboy hat, and suspenders. He tried to call the Pope, Jesus Christ, and John F. Kennedy to the witness stand. His case continues to be litigated, with the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals recently determining that Panetti must receive paid legal counsel, assistance from mental health experts that can help him build his case, and a full hearing to determine whether he is competent to be executed.

In other cases, juries are choosing not to give the death penalty to such defendants, though prosecutors are still asking for it. On July 26, in Jackson County, Mississippi, a judge sentenced Scotty Lakeith Street, who had a long history of chronic paranoid schizophrenia, to life without possibility of parole after the jury could not reach a unanimous sentencing verdict in his capital trial. He was convicted of murdering retired special education teacher Frankie Fairley, stabbing her 37 times. His attorneys presented evidence from family members, caregivers, and mental health experts of his lifelong history of “erratic” behavior, which two psychiatrists called “chronic and severe” mental illness. Witnesses described Street’s bizarre behavior, including putting plastic bags on his head “to keep his brain from leaking out,” swallowing nails, painting his body, and running naked in public.

A 2014 poll found that Americans oppose the death penalty for people with mental illness by more than a 2-1 margin. That has been reflected in a number of high-profile jury verdicts in the last few years in cases involving those with severe mental illness like James Holmes, who killed twelve people in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, and Joseph McEnroe, who murdered six members of his girlfriend’s family near Seattle.

TADP believes the best solution to these inconsistent results is to repeal the death penalty so that no juror is put in the position of determining who lives and who dies. Short of that, excluding those with severe mental illness from the death penalty is a common sense way to address at least some of the inconsistency plaguing the current system. Such a reform would also save the state millions of dollars that could then be used to treat these individuals before a murder occurs while also sparing victims’ families decades of litigation that will certainly accompany the death sentence.

It makes no sense to continue to accept such inconsistent sentencing. Something needs to change. The Tennessee Alliance for the Severe Mental Illness Exclusion (TASMIE) wants to make that change by advocating for the exclusion of those with the most severe mental illnesses from the death penalty. Though this exclusion falls short of what we need in Tennessee, the total repeal of the death penalty, it at least protects very sick people from execution, saves money, and give victims’ families some measure of legal finality as soon as the trial is over.

Photo of William Morva

I received an email this morning from Witness to Innocence, the nation’s only organization dedicated to empowering exonerated death row survivors to be the most effective voice in the struggle to end the death penalty in the United States.  The email reminded me that today marks 45 years since the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the death penalty was unconstitutional in Furman v. Georgia.

The email shared excerpts from Justice Thurgood Marshall concurrence in the decision to strike down the death penalty. Reading his words, I again realized that all the realities of  the death penalty system that became the basis to declare it unconstitutional are just as real in today’s death penalty. I have shared Justice Marshall’s words here:

“I believe that the following facts would serve to convince even the most hesitant of citizens to condemn death as a sanction: capital punishment is imposed discriminatorily against certain identifiable classes of people; there is evidence that innocent people have been executed before their innocence can be proved; and the death penalty wreaks havoc with our entire criminal justice system…

It is the poor, and the members of minority groups who are least able to voice their complaints against capital punishment. Their impotence leaves them victims of a sanction that the wealthier, better-represented, just-as-guilty person can escape. So long as the capital sanction is used only against the forlorn, easily forgotten members of society, legislators are content to maintain the status quo, because change would draw attention to the problem and concern might develop. Ignorance is perpetuated and apathy soon becomes its mate, and we have today’s situation…

Just as Americans know little about who is executed and why, they are unaware of the potential dangers of executing an innocent man. Our ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ burden of proof in criminal cases is intended to protect the innocent, but we know it is not fool-proof. Various studies have shown that people whose innocence is later convincingly established are convicted and sentenced to death.  

Proving one’s innocence after a jury finding of guilt is almost impossible. While reviewing courts are willing to entertain all kinds of collateral attacks where a sentence of death is involved, they very rarely dispute the jury’s interpretation of the evidence. This is, perhaps, as it should be. But, if an innocent man has been found guilty, he must then depend on the good faith of the prosecutor’s office to help him establish his innocence. There is evidence, however, that prosecutors do not welcome the idea of having convictions, which they labored hard to secure, overturned, and that their cooperation is highly unlikely.   

No matter how careful courts are, the possibility of perjured testimony, mistaken honest testimony, and human error remain all too real. We have no way of judging how many innocent persons have been executed but we can be certain that there were some. Whether there were many is an open question made difficult by the loss of those who were most knowledgeable about the crime for which they were convicted. Surely there will be more as long as capital punishment remains part of our penal law…

At a time in our history when the streets of the Nation’s cities inspire fear and despair, rather than pride and hope, it is difficult to maintain objectivity and concern for our fellow citizens. But, the measure of a country’s greatness is its ability to retain compassion in time of crisis…

In striking down capital punishment, this Court does not malign our system of government. On the contrary, it pays homage to it. Only in a free society could right triumph in difficult times, and could civilization record its magnificent advancement. In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute. We achieve ‘a major milestone in the long road up from barbarism’ and join the approximately 70 other jurisdictions in the world which celebrate their regard for civilization and humanity by shunning capital punishment.”

Image from The Buffalo News

I am a preventative kind of person. Some may say that is just code for “control freak” or “anal retentive.” Maybe it is. Whatever you call it, that’s me. I wash my hands dutifully before every meal, get my flu shot, floss, wear sunscreen…you get the point. I am a firm believer that whatever takes me out in the end is going to really have to try.

Maybe my preventative streak is why, when I read a recent article by my colleague Shari Silberstein about our nation’s approach to violence, I was immediately intrigued. Reflecting on Arkansas’ recent executions, Shari wonders what the results might be if we approached violence as a public health issue as much as a public safety issue.

I have always believed that we as a society are much more comfortable with reaction than prevention. In fact, execution is all about reaction once a violent crime has occurred. And too often, rather than doing the hard work of trying to determine the factors that led someone to commit such a crime, we dismiss such an analysis as making excuses for the perpetrator, choosing instead to focus all our energy and resources on how to punish him.

To be clear though, Shari points out that violent crime is, in fact, inexcusable. The damage is done and cannot be undone. Lives have been taken and families devastated. There is never an excuse for such behavior, but there are often indicators that such behavior is possible or maybe even likely.  And if identified, these indicators can serve as a an alarm system, signaling for us to intervene.

What if we did tackle violence like the measles or the flu? Recognizing, as Shari writes, that, “violence spreads. Public health experts who have long studied violence and its causes believe that violence can become much more rare. Rather than the failing of individual bad people, violence behaves just like other diseases that can either spread when treated ineffectively, or be systematically contained if treated properly.”

We already know evidence suggests that exposure to violence and trauma, especially during the early years of a child’s brain development, impacts future behavior. Children who endure such trauma, who also may have the added experiences of chronic poverty and racism, are at greater risk for developing mental and physical health problems, financial instability, and involvement with the justice system over their lifetimes. This is not news.

My parents were both public school teachers before they retired. They taught in public schools in a small West Tennessee town with many children impacted by just such trauma and other risk factors. Most of the teachers in the school system knew pretty quickly when a kid was in trouble. There were children that my parents even took a special interest in to mentor and nurture outside of the classroom because they knew how tenuous these children’s lives were. Still there is only so much a teacher with 25 other children in a classroom can do.  There is only so much a social worker with a huge caseload can do.

We spend roughly $3 million to pursue the death penalty per person once he has committed a murder. $3 million. What if we spent those dollars on a child when we determined that he or she was a victim of violence and trauma? What if we did a full assessment of what that child really needed to heal and grow into a healthy adult and then gave it to her? Imagine the impact. Maybe then we could keep violence from spreading and lives would be saved, including the future murder victim and the future murderer.

Something to think about.

Read Shari’s article here. 

I can’t stop thinking about Ledell Lee.

Since his execution last Thursday in Arkansas, the state executed two other individuals on Monday back-to-back, a first for any state since 2000. Eight men were slated to die in Arkansas over 10 days, beginning the day after Easter. A few have gotten reprieves, though perhaps only temporary. Three others are now dead. There are still victims’ families who are waiting, enduring this legal morass that is the death penalty system. Corrections officers’ who have been through three executions in six days will be asked to carry out others, even with all the risk associated with the use of the problematic drugs. It is reported that Marcel Williams’s execution did not go off as planned on Monday as he gasped and arched his back before finally getting still.

What is hardest for me to get my head around though is the complete breakdown of the legal process for Mr. Lee.  Mr. Lee received a death sentence over twenty years ago for the murder of Debra Reese. It is unimaginable what her family has been through during the past two decades. But all those years in court mean little if the defendant’s attorneys didn’t do their jobs. Mr. Lee received inadequate and ineffective representation at every stage of his case.

His trial lawyers failed to conduct a thorough investigation into his background for the mitigation phase of his trial, not even speaking to many of his siblings. And, they didn’t bother to talk to his mother about testifying. Instead of  a mitigation specialist, trial counsel hired a former police officer with no training or mental health background to investigate the case.

Then there is the performance of his post-conviction attorney. According to a Fair Punishment Project report:

Lee’s first state post-conviction attorney had substance abuse problems that left him “impaired to the point of unavailability on one or more days of the Rule 37 hearing.”[120] The Arkansas Supreme Court noted several examples of his lawyer’s “troubling behavior,” including “being unable to locate the witness room;” “repeatedly being unable to understand questions posed by the trial court or objections raised by the prosecution;” “not being familiar with his own witnesses;” and “rambling incoherently, repeatedly interjecting ‘blah, blah, blah,’ into his statements.”[121] Unsurprisingly, Ledell lost his state-post conviction petition. Eventually, the Arkansas Supreme Court recognized that Lee received grossly inadequate representation and withdrew its opinion, giving him new counsel.[122]

These new counsel were not much better, missing an important filing deadline. At one point, they were referred by the Arkansas Supreme Court  to the Committee on Professional Conduct.

The Arkansas court finally appointed the Arkansas Federal Defender to represent Mr. Lee. That office tried to litigate a claim that Mr. Lee was intellectually disabled. The state argued that he had procedurally defaulted this claim by not bringing it up earlier, and before the issue could be litigated, the federal defender was removed from the case due to a conflict.

And if this wasn’t enough, as his execution approached, the Innocence Project volunteered to test untested DNA evidence in Mr. Lee’s case at no cost to the state. Mr. Lee had proclaimed his innocence for 24 years, since his arrest. The state refused.

After his execution, the Innocence Project issued a statement saying, “Ledell Lee proclaimed his innocence from the day of his arrest until the night of his execution twenty-four years later. During that time, hundreds of innocent people have been freed from our nation’s prisons and death rows by DNA evidence. It is hard to understand how the same government that uses DNA to prosecute crimes every day could execute Mr. Lee without allowing him a simple DNA test.”

Hard to understand indeed.

(Picture: Benjamin Krain/The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette via AP, File)

Arkansas is set to execute eight men in a 10-day period this month in order to use the state’s execution drugs before they expire. In Arkansas’s protocol, the drug midazolam is supposed to induce unconsciousness before the other drugs are administered to stop the inmate’s breathing and their heart. Midazolam slows brain activity and allows for relaxation and sleep, but according to the Food and Drug Administration, it is not approved for use as an anesthetic by itself.

Midazolam has been involved in several botched executions, including the case of Clayton Lockett from Oklahoma, who lived for about 45 minutes after he was administered lethal injection drugs. He was seen convulsing and writhing before dying of a heart attack. Other problematic executions involving midazolam include the execution Joseph Wood in Arizona (which took two hours) as well as the execution of Dennis McGuire in Ohio.

Beyond the problems with the drug protocol and the rush to execute in Arkansas, Harvard’s Fair Punishment Project recently released a report about the eight men scheduled to die there: “At least five of the eight cases involve a person who appears to suffer from a serious mental illness or intellectual impairment. One of these men was twenty at the time of the crime, suffered a serious head injury, and has a 70 IQ score. Another man suffers from paranoid schizophrenia and believes that he is on a mission from God. He sees both his deceased father and reincarnated dogs around the prison.”

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that executing individuals with intellectual disabilities is a violation of the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution. The Court has also ruled it unconstitutional to execute individuals who do not have a basic competency to understand why they are being put to death.

Director of the Fair Punishment Project Rob Smith writes, “The Supreme Court reaffirmed that the death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the most culpable offenders, and yet it is very clear that individuals facing execution in Arkansas suffer from a number of crippling impairments that show they do not even come close to meeting that bar.”

The report also notes that the lawyering in some of these Arkansas cases was just bad. Some of the trial lawyers failed to perform basic duties, neglected to hire mitigation specialists to evaluate their client’s mental health, and did not talk to the defendants’ family members about their clients’ mental health histories.

The issues with mental health and the death penalty currently on display in these Arkansas cases confirm the importance of the work of the Tennessee Alliance for the Severe Mental Illness Exclusion (TASMIE) coalition to exclude individuals with the most severe mental illnesses from the death penalty.

In this legislative session, Senators Richard Briggs and Janice Bowling sponsored SB 378 to excluded those with severe mental illness from the death penalty, not only providing a safeguard for these very sick individuals but also potentially sparing victims’ families decades of capital litigation while saving taxpayers millions. The bill did not come up for a vote, but instead, the Senate Judiciary will conduct a study before next legislative session to hear more testimony about the merits of this bill.  Without such an exclusion moving forward, Tennessee will face the same problems as Arkansas as the state continues to sentence those with severe mental illness to death.

ACT NOW to help stop the assembly line of execution planning by Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, please click the link and take a few seconds to fill out this petition: http://act.ejusa.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=24486&track=ActionAR8in10-EM

Lately I have felt frustrated with politics, isolated, and not sure what to do about it. I believe that our nation is great because every voice and vote matter, but our lives are so busy and the problems so big that we sometimes neglect our role as citizens. On March 8^th, TADP invited me, along with supporters from all across the state, to come to Nashville to speak with legislators face to face about our concerns with the death penalty.

That was the goal of TADP Justice Day on the Hill: to give legislators the facts about how the current death penalty system is failing Tennesseans. With 30 people dedicated enough to travel from their respective parts of the state to Nashville, we not only shared with lawmakers but with each other. We stood with those whose lives have been directly impacted—the wrongfully convicted and murder victims’ families—to make sure our voices were and are heard.

It is because I was given the opportunity to listen to the beliefs of so many Tennesseans about the death penalty from such a variety of perspectives that I am now convinced that repeal is achievable. And, from hearing the feedback given by Tennessee lawmakers, I have reason to believe that they are becoming increasingly concerned about the policy as well.

To all of the murder victims’ family members who joined us, the wrongfully convicted, the educators, clergy, members of law enforcement, and others, thank you. You are the proof that democracy can work and the reason there will be an end to the death penalty in this state. Without you, without your dedication, support, and your voices, we would not be where we are. I am blessed to be a part of a community whose members take their responsibility as citizens so seriously.

Emily N. Haas, TADP Intern

I have been involved with working to end the death penalty in some capacity now for over twenty years now. One would think after all this time, I would cease to be surprised by the things I discover about just how flawed the system is. And just when I think I have heard it all, I am proven wrong again.

Take the case of Duane Buck. On February 22, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 6 to 2 decision that the Texas death row inmate would receive a new sentencing hearing. It seems that in the sentencing phase of Mr. Buck’s original trial, a psychologist testified to the jury that black defendants were more dangerous than white ones. And ironically, the psychologist was testifying on behalf of the defense.

Mr. Buck’s lawyers presented a report from the psychologist, Walter Quijano, who said that race was a factor to consider in determining future dangerousness of a defendant. Mr. Buck’s lawyer asked Dr. Quijano to elaborate. Dr. Quijano testified, saying, “It’s a sad commentary that minorities, Hispanics and black people, are overrepresented in the criminal justice system.” A prosecutor then asked a follow up question: “The race factor, black, increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons — is that correct?” Dr. Quijano answered, “Yes.”

Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the opinion awarding Mr. Buck a new sentencing hearing,

“Our law punishes people for what they do, not who they are. Dispensing punishment on the basis of an immutable characteristic flatly contravenes this guiding principle.”

Then on Friday, February 24, Tennessee death row inmate Andrew Thomas was awarded a new trial on his state conviction by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Thomas, who was given a death sentence for the murder of armored truck guard James Day in Memphis (a man who died two year after the robbery), was awarded a new trial when the court found that Thomas’ prosecutor had a duty to disclose that an important witness had been paid prior to the trial.

According to the Commercial Appeal, the judges keyed in on part of the case in which now-Shelby County District Attorney General Amy Weirich, who prosecuted Thomas, questioned the witness, Thomas’ former girlfriend Angela Jackson. Jackson denied being paid.

“Have you collected one red cent for this?” Weirich asked Jackson, according to a trial transcript.

“No, ma’am,” Jackson replied. “I have not.”

The judges said in the ruling that the prosecutor’s failure to disclose the evidence was “egregious.”

“This is all made even worse by the fact that the prosecutor failed to correct the record even after Jackson squarely denied receiving any ‘reward’ money in exchange for her testimony against Thomas,” the court said.

The ruling in the Thomas case comes as Weirich is also facing professional ethics charges by the Tennessee Board of Professional responsibility alleging misconduct in a separate case — the 2009 prosecution of Noura Jackson in the death of her mother, Jennifer Jackson. A hearing on those charges is scheduled for March. Also of concern in the Jackson case is the prosecution’s failure to turn over a witness statement to Jackson’s attorneys until after the trial.

In another case in 2014, Weirich denied knowledge of an envelope in the murder trial of Vern Braswell. Defense attorney Lauren Fuchs alleged that another lawyer, who had worked on the case previously, found an envelope marked with Weirich’s initials and “Do not show defense.”

Both the Buck and Thomas cases demonstrate just why we cannot trust the death penalty system to fairly and accurately determine who lives and who dies. These cases highlight again that no matter how much we work to improve the system, fallible human beings are not capable of being fair and accurate 100% of the time. There are too many factors in play. Taking a person’s life, when we already have cheaper alternatives to protect society and hold offenders accountable, has no place is such a system.

Read more about Duane Buck’s case.

Read more about Andrew Thomas’ case.

Photo of Andrew Thomas from the Commercial Appeal