The American Bar Association Death Penalty Due Process Project has released its Virginia Assessment on the Death Penalty.
The assessment is conducted by a state-based team responsible for collecting and analyzing various laws, rules, procedures, standards, and guidelines relating to the administration of capital punishment in Virginia. It is the Virginia Assessment Team’s responsibility to determine whether the state is in compliance with the ABA Protocols and make any other additional recommendations it feels are needed to improve the fairness and accuracy of Virginia’s death penalty system.
"Report cites flaws in Virginia death penalty," is the AP report filed by Larry O'Dell, via the Roanoke Times.
A panel of legal experts says Virginia lawmakers should make several changes to ensure fairness and accuracy in the state's death penalty system.The Virginia Death Penalty Assessment Team announced results of its two-year study Thursday in Richmond. The study is part of an American Bar Association initiative to examine procedures in a dozen states that have capital punishment.
The panel says one of the biggest problems in Virginia is an overly restrictive state appeals process. It recommends giving inmates more time to appeal and providing funding for their lawyers to hire experts.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, "Study urges fairness reforms in death penalty cases," by Frank Green.
A two-year study of Virginia’s death penalty to improve fairness and accuracy calls for safeguards in the use of suspect lineups and more access by defense lawyers to information to help them prepare cases.
The recommendations are among more than a dozen in the study sponsored by the American Bar Association and released this morning.
A top change urged by the Virginia Death Penalty Assessment Team is to require law enforcement agencies to adopt the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services’ model eyewitness identification policy for suspect photo and live lineups.
Misidentification played a role in the wrongful convictions of 18 Virginians later proven innocent in non-death penalty cases. Although the model policy was released in 2011, a recent survey by the University of Virginia Law School found few police departments had adopted it.
According to the Virginia department of Corrections, Virginia has executed 110 killers – 31 by electrocution and 79 by lethal injection since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976.
The toll is second nationally only to Texas, which has executed 503. But in Virginia three out of four persons sentenced to death since 1976 have been executed -- a higher rate than even in Texas, which has carried out roughly half its death sentences.
And:
The assessment team was chaired by John Douglass, a former federal prosecutor and dean of the University of Richmond Law School where he still teaches.
The panel also included Richmond Commonwealth's Attorney Michael Herring, who won a death sentence against Ricky Gray; Mark L. Earley, a former Virginia attorney general whose office defended many death sentences on appeal; and Craig Cooley, a Richmond lawyer who has represented clients in 70 capital murder trials including Lee Boyd Malvo, one of the two Maryland to Virginia snipers.
The report is the result of the ABA’s Death penalty Assessment project which since 2003 has studied and reported on the death penalty in 10 other states.
Earlier coverage of ABA state assesments begins at the link. The Death Penalty Due Process Project was formerly called the Moratorium Implementation Project.
Related posts are in the ABA category index.
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