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Lawyers' Group: Halt Executions Serious problems in state death penalty systems compromise fairness and accuracy in capital punishment cases and justify a nationwide freeze on executions, the American Bar Association said. The report is a compilation of separate reviews done over the past 3 years of how the death penalty operates in 8 states: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. Problems cited in a report released Sunday by the lawyers' organization include: Spotty collection and preservation of DNA evidence, which has been used to exonerate more than 200 inmates; misidentification by eyewitnesses; false confessions from defendants; and persistent racial disparities that make death sentences more likely when victims are white. Teams that studied the systems in Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania did not call for a halt to executions in those states. But the ABA said every state with the death penalty should review its execution procedures before putting anyone else to death. "After carefully studying the way states across the spectrum handle executions, it has become crystal clear that the process is deeply flawed," said Stephen F. Hanlon, chairman of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project. "The death penalty system is rife with irregularity." The ABA, which takes no position on capital punishment, did not study State and federal courts have effectively stopped most executions pending a high court decision. Prosecutors and death penalty supporters have said the 8 state studies were flawed because the ABA teams were made up mainly of death penalty Among The Findings: - Alabama does not require that biological evidence from a criminal case be preserved until a defendant is executed, compromising the ability of post-conviction petitioners to seek relief and prevent the execution of the innocent). - Post-conviction cases in Arizona usually are assigned to the original trial-level sentencing judge, which allows for the potential (if not mere appearance) of conflict of interest, as post-capital conviction proceedings will rise from a decision brought by the same judge. - Judicial override of jury sentences - the constitutionality of which is in doubt in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision in Ring v. Arizona - led to Florida juries' recommendations of life imprisonment without parole being disregarded by many judges. In fact, nearly 20 percent of the state's death penalty sentences imposed between 1972 and 1999 were by a judge overruling a jury's recommendation for life in prison. - Racial disparities in sentencing were noted in several states, such as Florida, where a criminal defendant in a capital case is 3.4 times more likely to receive the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is African-American. In addition, since Florida reinstated the death penalty in 1979, there have been no executions of white defendants for killing African-American victims. - Sentencing disparities reveal not only a racial bias but also geographic one as well: 43 % of those charged in Hamilton County in Ohio received a death sentence, making the chances of being executed 2.7 times higher than in the rest of the state, 3.7 times higher than in Cuyahoga County, and 6.2 times higher than in Franklin County. Likewise, the Tennessee Comptroller reported that nearly 1/2 (44.7%) of all Tennessee capital cases from 1993 to 2003 originated in Shelby County, one possible variable being the county's district attorney general. - Georgia is "virtually alone" in not providing indigent defendants sentenced to death with counsel for state habeas proceedings, undermining a critical constitutional safeguard. - Despite recent high-profile exonerations of 5 inmates who collectively served 50 years on death row, Pennsylvania was found not to have implemented any policies or procedures to reduce the chances of an innocent person being convicted, such as requiring all interrogations be recorded, and protecting against false eyewitness identifications. - Indiana was found to have a "significant" number of death row inmates who have severe mental disabilities (both those who were disabled at the time of the offense and those became seriously ill after conviction and - And in Ohio, access to expert testimony and investigative resources (crucial in capital cases) are denied to many capital defendants. "Those death penalty systems are not delivering the justice that the American people deserve and expect and indeed are guaranteed," Hanlon told CBS News. For More Information: American Bar Association Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project: (source: CBS) |
