Today's Philadelphia Inquirer carries the editorial, "Income shouldn't decide the quality of justice."
What defendant on trial for his life would willingly turn to a divorce lawyer with no experience in death-penalty cases?
Or to an attorney who had prepped for all of 15 minutes?
Or a Bible-quoting counsel who rattled off the one verse that, whoops, convinced jurors to hand down a death sentence?
As it turns out, dozens of people on trial for murder in Pennsylvania have had to rely on such ill-prepared, inept, and incompetent court-appointed counsel provided when defendants couldn't afford an attorney.
These are attorneys who - mostly because they're paid a pittance to prepare a complex death-penalty defense - prove to be well short of the task. The problem has been long-known, but it's finally gotten the full attention of the state's highest court.
In September, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court named a veteran Philadelphia judge, Benjamin Lerner, to investigate the compelling accusation of a Philadelphia-based death-penalty defense group that the courts are scrimping on justice by shortchanging the poor in capital cases.
That's a welcome and overdue step by the Supreme Court - a point driven home even more by an Inquirer review of death-penalty cases published Sunday.
In nearly one out of every three capital convictions stretching back over three decades, the courts have reversed or sent cases back for new hearings due to inadequate representation.
With so many botched legal defenses, no Pennsylvanian can be assured that the state's system of capital punishment is being administered fairly.
The Inquirer's news report on problems with Pennsylvania Capital Cases is noted at the link.
Today's Harrisburg News Patriot also features a lengthy news article, "How much is Pennsylvania's death penalty costing taxpayers?" It's written by Sara Ganim.
Since it was reinstated in 1978, only three people on death row in Pennsylvania have actually died by lethal injection, and those three defendants basically signed their own death warrants by waiving their rights to appeal.
A much higher number, about 140 people, have been released from death row following successful appeals.
Some were found to be innocent. Most simply had their sentences commuted to life in prison. But in the meantime, taxpayers were footing the bill for their lengthy appeals, and by lengthy, we’re talking decades.
State Sen. Stewart Greenleaf, a former prosecutor from Montgomery County and the chairman of the state Senate Judiciary Committee, has commissioned a bipartisan task force to take a look at what this bottleneck has cost taxpayers over the last 40 years. Right now, there are no estimates.
The task force will also explore whether the death penalty is worth keeping. Gov. Tom Corbett’s office has no position on the Greenleaf’s resolution.
And:
But if anyone has come close to compiling numbers that give a big-picture perspective, it’s Robert Dunham.
He’s a Harrisburg-based assistant federal defender, who began researching the results of cases by hand when he was director of the Death Penalty Resource Center in the 1990s.
People on both sides of this issue agree that he has the most accurate statistics on Pennsylvania death penalty cases.
His recordings show that 237 people have had their death penalty sentence overturned since 1978, but because he didn’t start researching them until the 1990s and the state keeps no records of these cases, he said it’s unclear what happened to about 75 of those defendants. He does know that about 15 defendants were sent back death row and are still there.
About 123 were resentenced to spend life in prison.
At least 12 people resentenced to less than life.
There were six complete exonerations — Nicholas Yarris and Harold Wilson, Jay Smith, William Nieves, Neil Ferber and Thomas Kimbell.
Another, Fred Thomas, got a new trial and died waiting for it.
Those results make Dunham believe that often the simple answer to Pennsylvania’s problem is that there is too little funding for poor defendants.
In many other states, when an inmate on death row exhausts appeals and the governor signs the death warrant, he or she is executed.
In Pennsylvania, the end of that same road is a new sentencing — sometimes an entirely new trial — and Dunham said many times it’s because it’s very common for public defenders on death penalty cases to be so underfunded that their defense is inadequate by the standards of the law.
Instead of paying for a better defense up front, Pennsylvanians are paying the price of years of appeals, hearings and re-investigations that often don’t even lead to death by lethal injection, Dunham said.
Former state Attorney General Ernie Preate said he witnessed that when he was a prosecutor.
Related posts are in the indigent defense index.
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