Brandi Grissom writes, "Judge to Rule on Death Penalty Constitutionality," for today's Texas Tribune. For those following the hearing's history, it's a must-read.
Texas' messy death penalty saga continues Monday in a Houston courtroom, where a district judge will for the first time in state history consider whether the risk of executing an innocent person makes capital punishment unconstitutional.
Harris County District Judge Kevin Fine is set to hold a hearing in the case of John Edward Green, who is charged with fatally shooting a Houston woman during a robbery in June 2008. Harris County prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the case. But Green’s attorneys and capital punishment opponents want Fine to rule that prosecutors can’t seek the death penalty because the way it is administered in Texas is unconstitutional. They say they have proof that at least two wrongfully convicted men have been executed. With so many chances for error in the courts, they argue, Texas shouldn't risk putting an innocent person to death. “The current system is profoundly and fundamentally flawed from top to bottom,” says Andrea Keilen, executive director of the Texas Defender Service.
Prosecutors, however, argue that higher courts, not a trial judge, should rule on the constitutionality of the death penalty. Besides, they write in a brief, Green hasn’t been convicted, so the whole question of the death penalty in his case ought to be a moot point.
The case before Fine is less about Green than a string of high-profile prosecutions that have raised serious questions about whether Texas has wrongfully sent innocent men to death row. Innocence Project co-director Barry Scheck, who is working on the Green case, says he'll focus on Cameron Todd Willingham and Claude Jones. Evidence obtained before and after their executions, he says, proves that both men were wrongfully convicted.
And:
James Liebman, the Simon H. Rifkind professor at Columbia Law School in New York, says that because the challenge comes in the most active death penalty state at a time when exonerations are on the rise, criminal justice advocates nationwide are paying attention to the Green case. “There’s just been a long string of outcomes and information pouring out of capital cases across country really, but particularly in Texas, which have called into question the capacity of the system to reach accurate results,” Liebman says.
Nationally, 139 people have been exonerated from death row since 1976, including 12 in Texas. The latest man to be freed from Texas death row was Anthony Graves, who was released in October after serving 18 years behind bars — 12 on death row — for his alleged role in the horrific murder of a family of six in 1992. Years after a court ordered a retrial in Graves' case, a new prosecutor in the county where Graves was convicted concluded there was not enough evidence to connect him to the crime. His initial conviction was based on the testimony of Robert Carter, who confessed to committing the murders and implicated Graves as his helper. Carter, as he lay in the execution chamber in 2000, admitted Graves had nothing to do with the crime.
Liebman says it's time for an exhaustive review of Texas death penalty procedures. “At a certain point,” he says, “evidence of the system’s inability to function appropriately leads to the conclusion there ought to be a real inquiry.”
"Death Penalty May Be Ruled Unconstitutional In Texas," is the title of Laura Bassett's Huffington Post report.
At a hearing scheduled for Monday, December 6, a district court in Texas will decide whether the death penalty is unconstitutional in the state based on the disproportionately high risk of wrongful convictions in Texas. This is the first time in the state's history that a court will examine the problem of innocent people being executed in a Texas capital trial.
John Edward Green, Jr., the defendant in Texas v. Green, is charged in the fatal shooting of a 34-year-old Houston woman during a 2008 robbery. According to legal documents obtained by HuffPost, Green's defense attorneys will be arguing on Monday that a number of factors in Texas's legal system increase the risk of wrongful executions there, including a lack of safeguards to protect against mistaken eyewitness identification, faulty forensic evidence, incompetent lawyers at the appellate level, failures to guard against false confessions and a history of racial discrimination in jury selection.
The death penalty in Texas came under fire earlier this month when a DNA test conducted on a single hair undermined the evidence that convicted a Texas man of capital murder over ten years ago. The hair had been the only piece of evidence linking Claude Jones to the crime scene, but the new test results revealed that the hair likely belonged to the murder victim instead of Jones.
Maurie Levin, a law professor at the University of Texas and an expert on capital punishment, said she would not be surprised if Judge Kevin Fine ruled the death penalty to be unconstitutional in Texas on Monday.
"I would think that Judge Fine would have substantial basis in the evidence that I'm aware of that would lead to a conclusion that the Texas death penalty is unconstitutional as applied," she told HuffPost.
Since 1976, twelve people have been exonerated from death row in Texas out of 139 nationwide, and four study commissions set up by the Texas government have formally recognized the serious risks of wrongful convictions there. Out of the 464 people that have been executed in Texas, about 70 percent have been minorities, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
The post, "Texas and the Death Penalty: Ur Doing It Wrong," is at New York Magazine, today.
For the first time in the state's history, Texas will examine whether its troublesome habit of executing innocent people means the death penalty should be ruled unconstitutional. At a hearing scheduled for this coming Monday, lawyers for John Edward Green Jr., a man accused of fatally shooting a Houston woman in a 2008 robbery, plan to draw attention to aspects of the Texas legal system that increase the risk of wrongful convictions. The lawyers intend to prove that there has been "a lack of safeguards to protect against mistaken eyewitness identification, faulty forensic evidence, incompetent lawyers at the appellate level, failures to guard against false confessions, and a history of racial discrimination in jury selection" — you know, just a few niggling impartialities baked into the system that determines the fate of a man's life.
Earlier coverage begins with this post. Complete coverage of the Todd Willingham and Claude Jones cases at the links.
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