Following up on yesterday's post about Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins' plans to review death penalty cases, AP reports, "Dallas DA to examine all death cases in county," via Google News.
A Texas district attorney known for his willingness to examine cases of possible wrongful convictions now plans to investigate all death row cases prosecuted in his county.
Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins said Monday he would seek to halt executions until he has reviewed the cases.
He acknowledged that his concerns stem from Dallas' nationally unmatched number of inmates whose convictions were tossed aside after DNA testing. A hearing is scheduled Friday for a 56-year-old who could become the 20th man since 2001 to have a wrongful Dallas County conviction reversed.
"I don't want someone to be executed on my watch for something they didn't do," Watkins said in Tuesday editions of The Dallas Morning News.
There are 41 inmates from Dallas County on death row, and two execution dates are scheduled in the next couple of months. Two people have been sent to death row since Watkins became district attorney in January 2007, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
The exonerations frequently reveal eyewitness misidentification and occasionally indicate prosecutorial misconduct as underlying causes for sending innocent people to prison.
Watkins said reviewing the capital murder convictions obtained by his predecessors could reveal systemic problems in the justice system and spur lawmakers to pass reforms.
"It's not saying I'm putting a moratorium on the death penalty," Watkins told the Dallas newspaper. "It's saying that maybe we should withdraw those dates and look at those cases from a new perspective to make sure that those individuals that are on death row need to be there and they need to be executed."
The Dallas Morning News' Rod Dreher writes, "What's Toby Shook really afraid of?," for the Opinion Blog.
DA Craig Watkins, who has overseen the DNA-based exoneration of more than a few prisoners in his short time in office, now wants to re-examine the cases of 40 death-row inmates from Dallas County, in light of DNA evidence. Not everyone's on board:
Toby Shook, who sent several people to death row while he was a Dallas County prosecutor, said Mr. Watkins was imposing an unnecessary new level of review and a hardship on victims' families.
"Perhaps he hasn't thought this through, but essentially what he's saying is, 'There is one more court of appeal and that's me,' " said Mr. Shook, who was defeated by Mr. Watkins two years ago. "That's going to be devastating to a family."
Perhaps Toby Shook hasn't thought this through, but if Dallas County put an innocent man behind bars on a wrongful murder conviction, hasn't that been devastating to that man and his family? Shouldn't Shook be more concerned about righting a possible injustice than about shattering the sense of closure the family of a murder victim may have received? The indifference to justice here -- especially in light of all the exonerations -- is startling and dismaying. It sounds like Shook is worried that Watkins might find that Shook et al. put an innocent man on death row.
Toby Shook's comments struck me as absurd, too. He is hardly the first prosecutor to take up the "closure for victims" mantra in opposition to re-examining convictions, but none of them can explain why victims and their families are better served by locking up an innocent person and letting the guilty go free. In the matter of capital cases, perhaps he is fearful that Watkins' review may not only disclose innocents on death row, but innocents from Dallas County who have already paid with their lives for someone else's crime. That's what happens when a system is rooted in revenge and fueled by the drive to win at all costs (except costs to oneself).
Posted by: Truth in Justice | Thursday, 18 September 2008 at 04:37 AM