"Clemency board is now a charade," is the Arizona Republic editorial.
Asserting that a prisoner had received "incompetent legal counsel" has become a fairly commonplace defense of death-row inmates.
But accusing the state clemency board of incompetency?
That is a novel development in the nation's long-running fight over the death penalty. Only in Arizona.
But that accusation, sensationaly lodged this month by an attorney representing a death-row inmate, has led to a legitimate question about the material significance of a "clemency" board that is intentionally stacked to avoid recommending clemency.
If the person vested with the power to grant clemency -- in this case Gov. Jan Brewer -- so dislikes granting forgiveness to convicts that she will stack the board with (presumably) anti-clemency hard cases, then why bother with a "clemency" charade at all?
And:
The governor appears to have been displeased with being forced to consider all the clemency recommendations that the previous board had been sending to her. So she sought resignations from three of them, including longtime chairman Duane Belcher and Marilyn Wilkens, who was appointed in 2010 by Brewer herself.
The mandate of this new clemency board could not be clearer. Trouble this governor with clemency recommendations at your peril.
Those are disturbing marching orders. Thanks to the Brewer purge, Arizona no longer has a mechanism that can reliably -- which is to say, independently -- reconsider whether justice was done. And that is very dangerous.
Earlier coverage of Arizona clemency issues begins at the link. Related posts are in the clemency index.
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