Andrew Cohen posts, "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Execution," at the Atlantic.
Twenty-six years after the fact, too late but just in time, a measure of justice finally found Terry Williams on Friday when a Pennsylvania judge, a former prosecutor, stayed his October 3 execution and vacated a death sentence that had been unfairly imposed upon him in 1986. No reasonable review of Williams' case -- no evaluation of the evidence, no respect for his trial jurors or the victim's widow, no fealty to the Sixth Amendment's fair trial guarantees -- can sustain, in law or fact, the imposition of capital punishment here.
And yet today, seeking to defend an indefensible verdict, unapologetic about the misconduct of his predecessor, impervious to the dynamics of child sex abuse cases, tone-deaf to local politics and morality in the Age of Sandusky, unrepentant about misstatements to the state's parole board, Williams' prosecutor pushes on. I have been covering capital cases like this for 15 years and I can rarely remember an instance where a district attorney fought so willfully for so long for the right to do an injustice. It's a risible offense.
And:
Instead of accepting Judge Sarmina's reasoned judgment, instead of acknowledging that defendants like Williams are entitled to a meaningful remedy when the state cheats at trial, instead of preparing for a new sentencing hearing which would include all the relevant evidence, Williams' current prosecutor doubled down.Late Friday, Seth Williams (obviously no relation) issued a statement that beggars belief. In Seth Williams' world, the prosecutor who cheated in 1986 in a capital case has been "unfairly victimized." In this world, he is obliged to "preserve the integrity of the jury's verdict and sentence" even though nearly half of that jury has walked away from its work. What "integrity" is left to protect about an inaccurate sentence? Seth Williams didn't say. But he was sure to tell the world that he doesn't want to make a villain out of the victim, Amos Norwood, the child sex predator.
None of this excuses what Terry Williams did. But it sure explains it, doesn't it? And isn't that the essence of what the sentencing phase of a capital trial should be about? Terry Williams is not getting away with anything, he's not cheating anyone, and that's never been the point of this round of appeals. If he is not executed, he will spend the rest of his life in prison, which is the sentence he almost certainly would have gotten in 1986 had prosecutors played by the rules, had jurors been given all the relevant evidence, and had a capital defendant been given adequate counsel.
But even this is not good enough for prosecutor Williams. He immediately appealed Judge Sarmina's ruling. Want to know why more and more Americans are skeptical of the death penalty, why the constitutional guarantees of due process and fair trials so often go unmet? It's because of cases like this one, where prosecutors cheat at trial and where their successors, decades later, cannot then admit, to themselves or the world, that such behavior undercuts confidence in the accuracy and integrity of the criminal justice system.
"Lawyers ask state's chief justice to step down from death row case," is the AP filing, via WITF-FM.
Lawyers for a death-row inmate facing a possible execution Wednesday want Pennsylvania's chief justice to step down from the case.
Lawyers for Terrance "Terry" Williams argue that Chief Justice Ronald Castille should recuse himself because Castille supervised Williams' death-penalty case when he was Philadelphia's district attorney.
WHYY-FM posts, "Terrance Williams safe for now, but D.A. falls short of 'zealous, ethical and effective' standards," by Aja Beech, a board member of Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.
Williams is one of over 200 people on Pennsylvania's death row and almost half of those people have come from Philadelphia. Of the 95 people on death row that have come from Philadelphia courts, approximately 18 of those cases were tried and sentenced to death in a period from 1983 until 1987, according to an execution list maintained by the state. (See document below.) This four-year period has come under great scrutiny because of issues such as the McMahon tapes, an instructional video made in 1986 by senior prosecutor at the time in the Philadelphia district attorney's office Jack McMahon on excluding "young blacks" from juries.
The verdict in the Williams hearing confirmed that the original prosecutor willfully withheld and suppressed important information relevant to the initial Williams case in the late 1980s, continuing the tragic saga of justice deferred in Philadelphia.
And:
Something is wrong with the capital punishment system in Pennsylvania, and our state is finally starting to see this. There are some in state government working to fix this problem, such as Senators Daylin Leach and Stewart Greenleaf, who on behalf of the bipartisan task force and advisory committee studying the death penalty in Pennsylvania, released a letter requesting "no execution be carried out in the Commonwealth" until the study is completed in December 2013. That we may be sure we are doing the right thing by proceeding with state executions; can we not wait a year until we are sure it is within the law and ethics of our state to do so?
Earlier coverage of Terry Williams' case begins at the link.
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