Today's Jackson Clarion-Ledger carries the editorial, "Death penalty: State should spare Dale Bishop."
This newspaper has been a longtime supporter of the enforcement of the death penalty in Mississippi. The death penalty exists in this state as the ultimate penalty for the ultimate crimes.
But in the case of Death Row inmate Dale Leo Bishop, Mississippi is preparing to extract the ultimate penalty from Bishop when it appears clear that Bishop did not commit the ultimate crime.
Bishop, 34, was sentenced to death in 2000 for the kidnapping and slaying of 22-year-old Marcus Gentry of Fulton. Gentry was beaten with an 18-ounce carpenter's framing hammer on a dirt logging road outside Saltillo on Dec. 10, 1998, after an argument.
Trial testimony - undisputed trial testimony - indicates that Bishop was not the man swinging the hammer that delivered the fatal blows to victim's head.
Under Mississippi law, an accessory before the fact can be convicted of the same crime someone else commits. Testimony identified Jessie Johnson as the one who repeatedly hit Gentry with the hammer. Johnson is now serving life without parole in the murder. Although Bishop held and kicked Gentry, not beat him, Bishop was sentenced to death.
Had Bishop been convicted in the neighboring states of Alabama or Louisiana., he would not be facing execution because 13 of the 36 states with the death penalty - as well as the U.S. military - bar the execution of a defendant who wasn't directly responsible for a murder.
If Bishop, who suffers from mental illness, receives a lethal injection on Wednesday, he would be only the eighth person put to death - and the first since 1996 - who did not directly kill the victim (not including contract killings) in the more than 1,100 executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
I'm uncertain about the numbers used by the newspaper in the last paragraph. This issue tracks the Texas law of parties. I'll have more on this later.
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