Nov. 13 ALABAMA: A spiritual issue I am best known for my efforts fighting for tax reform in Alabama. Like many tax and business types, I vowed to never publicly discuss a topic as ugly and raw as the death penalty. And until five years ago, when the brutal murder of my beloved housekeeper and friend by her husband personally dragged me into this ugly and raw world, I did not have to. Like most lawyers, for years I have known that the facts set forth by The Birmingham News editorial board are absolutely true. Alabama's death penalty system is indisputably arbitrary, racially biased, of no value for deterrence, especially unfair to the poor and, most disturbingly, has an unacceptable level of errors. When friends and colleagues privately asked for my opinion as to whether we should have the death penalty, relying on these intellectually based grounds, without hesitating, I used to answer "no." Then it happened. Early one Saturday morning in late July 2000 as I was happily padding around my kitchen feeding my two children, who were at that time going into the second and fifth grades, the call came in: "Susan, Rick Stevens killed Cindy last night." Screaming, crying and hysteria swept through and invaded the tranquillity of my home. It spread from me to my children with my husband trying to calm everyone down and call the police to confirm. It was true. Later that day, my exhausted husband took me to the police station to be interviewed. Cindy had confided in me several months earlier that her husband was abusive and that she wanted out. I sent her to Turning Point, which offers counseling and other services to domestic violence victims, and helped her find a lawyer. She filed for divorce and was determined to stick with it. The last thing I remember her saying was, "I am so looking forward to my future." Those words haunted me as the homicide investigator led me past Cindy's teenage daughter, crying for her mother, into the interview room. Those words haunted me when I learned that Rick walked his and Cindy's two children across the street to a neighbor's house, returned home, stabbed Cindy 67 times with a knife from their kitchen and then called the police and confessed when they arrived. Those words continue to haunt me and probably always will. That monster did much more than rob the many people who loved Cindy of ever seeing her again. He robbed Cindy of her future. My first comment to the homicide investigator was: "Surely you are going to charge him with capital murder." So much for being opposed to the death penalty on the intellectually based grounds of the system being broken. When it was my friend, I swept all those concerns aside. I wanted that monster to pay the ultimate price. Here is the rub: Attorney General Troy King is right in his eloquently stated plea to remember the victims; the death penalty is much more than just an intellectual issue. However, Bryan Stevenson and The News editorial board are also right in their ironclad analysis that the death penalty in Alabama is being administered in an indisputably unjust manner, which amounts to legally sanctioned vengeance and is certainly not consistent with a culture of life and a civilized society. So what are we to do? I have no answer to the profound philosophical and theological issue whether the death penalty is necessary to provide justice for victims or whether it is always unjust and offends a culture of life. However, I strongly believe as a state where most of us claim to be Christian believers, we must spiritually confront the injustice within Alabama's death penalty system as resulting primarily from the sins of greed, indifference and vengeance. It is quite clear we need substantially more tax dollars to provide qualified legal counsel for all capital defendants. But if we are unwilling to adequately fund our schools, can we even hope to get enough taxpayer support to adequately defend those accused of heinous crimes? With the help of our religious leaders, we must spiritually confront our greedy unwillingness to support this funding, and, we must also spiritually confront the indifference many of us feel toward the other facts showing the death penalty is not being administered fairly. I also strongly believe we cannot overcome the greed and indifference sustaining the injustice of the current death penalty system unless we also seriously acknowledge the wrenching emotional turmoil caused by the unquestionable evil inflicted by those committing horrendous crimes. Failure to do this cripples our ability to spiritually confront and curb our natural human desire for vengeance, which is the greatest sin keeping the death penalty system in its current form alive. I learned on that awful Saturday morning 5 years ago when Cindy was murdered that it is very easy to overlook the facts The News' editorial board has courageously put in our faces. In Alabama, the gap between people consumed with these emotions and those focusing mostly on the disturbing facts is too wide. Our state will not be able to provide justice for both victims of capital crimes and defendants accused of them unless our religious leaders courageously challenge all of us to confront the death penalty as a major spiritual issue that must find balance between these 2 conflicting ways of perceiving this raw and ugly world. (source: Opinion, Birminham News; Susan Pace Hamill is a professor of law at the University of Alabama School of Law) ******************* Death penalty moratorium needed Regardless of how Alabamians feel about the death penalty, are they willing for the state to kill people by mistake? Because according to a new study by the American Civil Liberties Union and nine other organizations, flaws in our capital justice system place African-American, low-income and disabled Alabamians at risk of wrongful execution. That's why the Legislature should place a moratorium on executions in Alabama. The study's review of Alabama murder, conviction and sentencing statistics by race of victim and perpetrator reveals disturbing patterns: --80 % of death row inmates were convicted of murdering people who were white, yet nearly 65 % of Alabama murders each year involve African-American victims. --Only 6 % of murders in the state involve African-American defendants and white victims, but more than 60 percent of African-American death row inmates were convicted of killing people who were white. --The over-representation of African-Americans on death row points to racial im balance on the bench and the bar. In a state that is more than one-quarter African-American, none of the 19 appellate court judges and none of the 42 elected district attorneys are African-American. --Racial disparity on death row also reflects racism in the jury selection process. In the last 15 years, 23 capital cases were reversed in Alabama because prosecutors had illegally excluded African-Americans from jury service in those cases. Alabama discriminates against low-income people accused of a capital offense, regardless of their race, by failing to provide adequate legal representation for indigents. But this pattern, too, has racial consequences. Although whites outnumber African-Americans in Alabama by three to one, the 2000 U.S. Census reported that African-Americans made up slightly more than half of the 700,000 Alabamians living in poverty. Injustices affecting poor people in our state affect African-Americans disproportionately. Unlike most states, Alabama has no statewide public defender system. In compliance with federal mandates, Alabama law requires the state to provide legal counsel to persons who challenge criminal charges but can't afford a lawyer. The state currently pays court-appointed attorneys $60 per hour for time spent in court and $40 per hour for out-of-court work on the case -- significantly below the market rate for lawyers in private practice. Court-appointed defense attorneys often lack the knowledge, skill, experience or inclination to handle capital cases. Such an attorney may fail to call witnesses or may fail to present important evidence that could prove a client's innocence or at least mitigate the sentence during the penalty phase of a trial. Indeed, Alabama's system provides low-income people with legal representation so inadequate that it can allow innocent people to be convicted. In many cases, it's not the facts of the crime but the quality of the legal representation that determines whether the death penalty is imposed. On the other side of the bench, Alabama is one of only a handful of states that permit "judicial override." Roughly 22 percent of Alabama's death-row inmates were sentenced by a jury to life without parole, only to have that decision changed to a death sentence by the judge. In Alabama, the opinion of a 12-member jury is worth less than the opinion of one elected official -- often one who campaigned on a promise to "get tough on crime." Since 1976, Alabama has put to death 22 people for capital crimes committed when they were juveniles. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that the execution of offenders who were under the age of 18 when their crimes were committed violates the Eighth and 14th amendments to the Constitution. This decision, in Roper vs. Simmons, invalidates Alabama's age threshold of 16 years for application of the death penalty. Fourteen Alabama death row inmates were affected by the decision and should be re-sentenced. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Atkins vs. Virginia that the execution of mentally retarded persons is cruel and unusual punishment. The decision left to the states the responsibility to define mental retardation and to establish procedures for determining whether or not a person is mentally retarded. Following Atkins, many states passed statutes to address these questions, but the Alabama Legislature has failed to act. Since 1976, Alabama has convicted and sentenced to death 27 defendants whose evident mental illness and/or retardation went unpresented or unexplored at trial. At least 4 of these persons have been executed. Even many organizations that actively favor the death penalty acknowledge that the possibility of executing innocent persons because of racial bias, inadequate defense, judicial politics or other factors raises serious concerns. A poll this past summer by the Capital Survey Research Center found that 57 % of Alabamians would support a temporary halt to executions while policymakers evaluate the fairness of our system. In light of the high stakes outlined above and in the new report (available online at www.aclualabama.org), numerous organizations are calling on the Legislature to pass a 3-year moratorium on the death penalty. These organizations include Alabama Arise, Alabama CURE, the Alabama Committee to Abolish the Death Penalty, the Alabama Democratic Conference, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama, Alabama New South Coalition, the Alabama Prison Project, Amnesty International, the NAACP of Alabama, Project Hope to Abolish the Death Penalty, and the Restorative Justice Team of the North Alabama Conference/United Methodist Church. (source: Opinion, Mobile Register) IDAHO: Judge gives thoughtful review on the death penalty Idahoans should pay attention when a judge who sent 1 man to death row and set another condemned man free says we should rethink the frequency of death sentences. U.S. District Judge B. Lynn Winmill says the death penalty is expensive, can be politically motivated and is risky because innocents are sometimes sentenced to die. The power to condemn belonged to judges in Idaho until 2003. Now, only juries can impose the death penalty, which prompted Winmill to speak out. "Today, I'm going to pass the torch to you," Winmill told the City Club of Boise early this month. "I think the death penalty is perhaps sought and imposed, at least historically, more often than it should be. I think we as judges, and we as citizens now in juries, need to be very thoughtful," Winmill said. "It requires each of us to critically think it through, consider the costs, consider the utility, consider whether we are simply getting carried away in this effort to promote law and order," he said. "And to think whether or not a life sentence without possibility of parole is an adequate punishment for far more of the murder cases than typically imposed." Winmill spoke with 2 men by his side, Charles Fain, who was exonerated by DNA evidence and freed by Winmill in 2001 after 18 years on death row, and Fred Hoopes, a lawyer who represented Fain. Winmill said releasing Fain prompted him to revisit a second case and link it with Fain as a way "to challenge the public to think seriously about the death penalty." As a state judge in Pocatello, Winmill sentenced James Wood to death for the 1993 murder of 11-year-old Jeralee Underwood. I was in Pocatello when Winmill, a local boy who'd graduated from Idaho State and went on to Harvard Law School, faced enormous pressure to condemn Wood. He heard suggestions Wood ought to be caged and shot at by the public until dead, or carved to death. In court, Winmill heard how Wood kidnapped and killed Jeralee and returned six days later to have intercourse with the corpse, cut the body up with a hatchet and knife, and throw the pieces in the Snake River. "I felt like it was an offering to Satan," Wood said. Winmill and I listened to a 19-year-old recall how Wood raped and left her for dead in the Missouri woods. "It's time to say Good night," Wood said, smirking, before firing the same pistol he used to kill Jeralee 10 months later. Wood caused Winmill to lose sleep, drop weight, pray and have recurring nightmares. The dreams stopped after he sentenced Wood because Wood's crime met Winmill's high standard for a death sentence: His guilt was unquestioned, he'd pleaded guilty and confessed to a string of crimes, including murder. No irrational factor such as race prompted prosecutors to seek the death penalty. Reasonable people would agree Wood's extraordinary cruelty demanded retribution. But Winmill said other cases are troublesome. At least 30 prisoners have been released from death row after DNA tests proved them innocent. "How many others are there on death row who also are not guilty but DNA evidence is simply not available?" he asked. Any deterrent effect from the death penalty is unproven, despite decades of study, Winmill said, and 60 % of Americans do not believe it deters crime. The cost to taxpayers is high. Winmill said he's tried to get federal courts to provide financial information, but found it unavailable. He said officials are "loathe to discuss the cost," and cited a report by the Los Angeles Times, which said California and federal taxpayers spent $250 million for each of 11 executions over a 27-year-span. Idaho has executed one killer since 1957, Keith Wells, who dropped appeals and asked to die. Wood died of natural causes in 2004. "I frankly think there may be a fear of a firestorm of criticism of the actual cost of litigating if this is ever revealed publicly," he said. Winmill fears politics influence judges and prosecutors, who run for election every four years in Idaho. "Both judges and prosecutors stand for election and have no insulation from making a decision about the death penalty. That's where the real concern is." He supports having the state pay for murder prosecutions so counties aren't making decisions based on county budgets. He proposes a statewide screening commission to review cases and decide whether they meet a heightened standard for the death penalty, separating decisions from local politics. Winmill has little hope his reform ideas will attract Idaho lawmakers. He joked they wouldn't be interested. They ought to be. Winmill is more than one of our best judges, he's got guts and one of the finest minds in Idaho. Now that ordinary citizens decide who lives and dies, we all would benefit from a careful review of the ideas of a man who's been there, giving both the guilty and the innocent the justice they deserve. (source: The Idaho Statesman)
