And the public is growing skeptical. In Santa Clara County, where juries have delivered 28 inmates to death row, the board of supervisors recently voted to support a statewide moratorium. In the meantime, California pays a steep price for every execution it does carry out. And reversals exact other costs.
They raise doubts about whether defendants are getting fair trials. They often leave police and prosecutors unable to do anything with old cases sent back for retrial. Take the case of convicted murderer Michael Jackson. Two years later, prosecutors are still deciding whether to seek the death penalty again. Even if he is returned to death row, Jackson will go to the end of the line.
There is no way we can move on with our lives until we have this resolved. In , they put more than 20 killers on death row. State, U. When it comes to death sentences, the California Supreme Court and federal courts seldom agree. Federal judges overturn them. The conflict between these two powerful institutions can be seen in cases like that of James Richard Odle, who was convicted in of murdering a Contra Costa County woman and then killing a police officer in a shootout.
Long before the slayings, doctors treating Odle for injuries suffered in a car accident had removed part of his brain. The state Supreme Court, in rejecting his appeals on four occasions, never considered the brain injury relevant to whether Odle was mentally competent to stand trial.
A comprehensive Mercury News review of death-penalty appeals found 36 cases in which the California Supreme Court noted problems in a trial and decided they were not important enough to reverse a death sentence — and a federal court later overturned the sentence because of those same problems. The review found that federal courts, by reversing six out of 10 California death sentences, are overturning a higher percentage of capital cases than any other state.
But it is the California Supreme Court that has moved further from the national norm in ruling on these life-and-death cases, affirming nine of every 10 it reviews. Studies show that the California Supreme Court is less likely to overturn a death sentence than just about any of the 38 state high courts that review capital appeals.
For California, the consequences of this conflict are enormous, with more than inmates on death row waiting for their appeals to make their way through the system. The review indicates that the federal courts have become a formidable counterweight to the conservative California Supreme Court that grew out of the election in which voters removed Chief Justice Rose Bird and two liberal colleagues who consistently voted to reverse death sentences.
The court, which covers California and eight other states, has voted eight times since November to reverse a California death sentence. George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson. And the death penalty remains such a political must in California that Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat, demands support for it from his judicial nominees, including his recent choice for the Supreme Court, Carlos Moreno. Federal judges are appointed for life. His court takes a hard look at every death sentence, he said.
Given the fallibility of human judgment, there has always been the danger that an execution could result in the killing of an innocent person. Nevertheless, when the U. Supreme Court held the administration of the death penalty to be unconstitutional in , there was barely any mention of the issue of innocence in the nine opinions issued.
Although mistakes were surely made in the past, the assumption prevailed that such cases were few and far between. Almost everyone on death row was surely guilty. However, as federal courts began to more thoroughly review whether state criminal defendants were afforded their guaranteed rights to due process, errors and official misconduct began to regularly appear, requiring retrials.
When defendants were now afforded more experienced counsel, with fairly selected juries, and were granted access to scientific testing, some were acquitted and released. New death sentences have remained near record lows since after peaking at more than per year in the mids. Executions have declined significantly over the past two decades. Ten of the 22 states that have abolished the death penalty have done so since : New Jersey , New York , New Mexico , Illinois , Connecticut , Maryland , Delaware , Washington , New Hampshire , and Colorado In , California joined Oregon and Pennsylvania in imposing a moratorium on executions.
And the near-universal opposition to capital punishment among Democratic presidential candidates signifies a major shift from , when Bill Clinton left the campaign trail to oversee an execution in Arkansas.
We provide information about death sentences and executions in Alabama—including that the state consistently has one of the highest per capita execution rates in the nation. EJI has been challenging the death penalty for more than 30 years. We represent people who have been sentenced to death and have won relief for over people.
We advocate across the globe and build support for abolition with projects like Just Mercy. EJI won an important victory when the Supreme Court recognized that people with dementia, like our client Vernon Madison, are protected from execution. Death Penalty The question we need to ask about the death penalty in America is not whether someone deserves to die for a crime.
Innocence and Error. Inadequate Counsel. Racial Bias. Public Safety. Our Work. As a result, a stunning number of innocent people have been sentenced to death.
The same factors drive wrongful convictions in non-capital cases and death penalty cases, including: erroneous eyewitness identifications false and coerced confessions inadequate legal defense false or misleading forensic evidence false accusations or perjury by witnesses who are promised lenient treatment or other incentives in exchange for their testimony. Inadequate Counsel The death penalty is mostly imposed on poor people who cannot afford to hire an effective lawyer.
Racial Bias People of color are more likely to be prosecuted for capital murder, sentenced to death, and executed, especially if the victim in the case is white. Arbitrariness The death penalty is supposed to be reserved for the most culpable. Instead, it's inflicted on the most vulnerable. Intellectual Disability In , the Court in Atkins v.
Public Safety The death penalty is a barrier to effective crime prevention. It does not make us safer. Bush of Texas has presided over executions, more than any governor in history. Saltzburg, a former Justice Department official in the Reagan administration who is now a law professor at George Washington University.
Similarly, Sen. Patrick Leahy D-Vermont , who is both a former prosecutor and a critic of the death penalty, said the figures are very troubling. Utah law professor Cassell, a former federal prosecutor and a death penalty supporter, emphasized that in most cases that were reversed, the death sentence was annulled but not the conviction.
Gerald Kogan, former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, does not share that confidence. The retired jurist is now serving as co-chairman of the bipartisan National Committee to Prevent Wrongful Executions.
Since , 87 inmates have been freed from death rows across the nation because of wrongful convictions for reasons including mistaken identification, prosecutorial misconduct or newly discovered exculpatory evidence, including the results of DNA tests that have led to eight exonerations. The authors launched their study in Of the 5, death sentences meted out by juries between and , the scholars reviewed 4, cases that have gone through appeals.
They include three stages of review: direct appeals to state courts based on the trial record, and post-conviction reviews by state and federal courts, which deal with issues beyond the trial record including alleged prosecutorial misconduct or incompetent representation by defense lawyers. The study looked at all death sentence appeals since the start of the modern death sentencing era and available information on eventual retrials.
0コメント