NCADP: National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
Do Not Execute Shawn Humphries! SOUTH CAROLINA Take action at www.demaction.org/dia/organizations/ncadp/campaign.jsp?campaign_KEY=1585 Shawn Humphries December 2, 2005 Shawn Paul Humphries, a white man, faces execution on Dec. 2, 2005 for the Jan. 1, 1994 death of Dickie Smith in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. After driving around drinking beer all night, Humphries and his friend Eddie Blackwell allegedly attempted to rob Smith's convenience store. When Smith reached under the counter to pull out a gun Humphries shot him and ran out of the store leaving Blackwell behind. Humphries did not intend to kill Smith. Although his actions were definitely negligent he did not act like a cold-blooded and calculated killer. He panicked when Smith reached for a gun. This is evident from the fact that he did not kill Donna Brashier, who was also present at the time of the shooting and therefore a potential witness. It is also clear from the fact that he left his accomplice behind that he had not planned to shoot Dickie Smith. Humphries was 22 at the time of the crime. He had suffered an extensive history of emotional, physical, and substance abuse. Humphries father had been an extremely violent man and is the one who introduced Humphries to drugs and alcohol when Humphries was between the ages of six and ten. Humphries was a disturbed young man who did a terrible thing, but he is certainly not the worst of the worst and most definitely not an appropriate candidate for capital punishment. Another important factor in Humphries' case is the prosecutor's closing statement. As the dissenting Justice Wilkinson of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit wrote "No person should be executed in America on the theory that his life is of less worth than that of someone else." Unfortunately the prosecuting attorney did not agree. During closing arguments the prosecutor explicitly compared Humphries' and Smith's respective lives. He told the jury what Smith was doing in a given year and then what Humphries did in the same year for the years leading up to the night that the two paths crossed. The prosecutor finished by stating that "when you look at the character of this Defendant, and when you look at Dickie Smith, how profane when you look at all the circumstances of this crime and of this Defendant, how profane to give this man a gift of life under these circumstances." Clearly the prosecution does everything short of using the word compare in order to ask the jury to compare the worth of the defendant and the victim. However in this country we do not execute people based on the how they lived their lives. Our legal system is tailored to look at the crime in question, not the comparative worth of the lives of the parties. As Justice Wilkinson said "Human worth comparisons are the hallmarks of totalitarian governments. They do not belong in our country..The most terrifying regimes of the Twentieth Century were those in which governments weighted the value of the lives of their citizens as a prelude to executing them." He then states that he "realize[s] that the transgression before us today does not even approach the most terrible examples of human expendability [however t]o accept this sentence is to set foot on a road Americans will not recognize and our Constitution will not tolerate." Furthermore, the fact that Humphries' lawyers did not object to the prosecutors' closing argument is clearly proof that Humphries suffered from ineffective counsel. In fact Humphries' trial counsel admitted that their failure to object constituted ineffective assistance of counsel. Moreover, this lapse on the part of trial counsel clearly had the potential to seriously prejudice jurors immediately before they begin to discuss their decision. In effective assistance of counsel cases, defendants face the burden of proving not only that their lawyer's performance was deficient but also that the deficiency resulted in harm to the client. Clearly this case meets both criteria. Shawn Paul Humphries should not be put to death by the state. Please write to South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford to commute Shawn Humphries' sentence to life imprisonment. Source: NCADP
