The StandDown Texas Project

Continuing Coverage of Bryan Stevenson's 'Just Mercy'

The New York Times Sunday Book Review contained, "'Just Mercy,’ by Bryan Stevenson."  It's by Ted Conover, a journalism professor and nonfiction author.  Here's the beginning:

Unfairness in the Justice system is a major theme of our age. DNA analysis exposes false convictions, it seems, on a weekly basis. The predominance of racial minorities in jails and prisons suggests systemic bias. Sentencing guidelines born of the war on drugs look increasingly draconian. Studies cast doubt on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Even the states that still kill people appear to have forgotten how; lately executions have been botched to horrific effect.

This news reaches citizens in articles and television spots about mistreated individuals. But “Just Mercy,” a memoir, aggregates and personalizes the struggle against injustice in the story of one activist lawyer.

Bryan Stevenson grew up poor in Delaware. His great-grandparents had been slaves in Virginia. His grandfather was murdered in a Philadelphia housing project when Stevenson was a teenager. Stevenson attended Eastern College (now Eastern University), a Christian institution outside Philadelphia, and then Harvard Law School. Afterward he began representing poor clients in the South, first in Georgia and then in Alabama, where he was a co-founder of the Equal Justice Initiative.

TIME posts, "10 Questions With Bryan Stevenson," by Belinda Luscombe.

Just Mercy is about getting legal help for poor people in Alabama. What are the biggest impediments?

We have a criminal-justice system that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent. I don’t believe that America’s system is shaped by culpability. I think it’s shaped by wealth. The poor are very vulnerable in a system that relies so heavily on skilled advocates, then doesn’t provide skilled advocates. Until recently, [court-appointed] lawyers in Alabama could only be paid $1,000 for their out-of-court time. A lawyer could make more defending a traffic ticket than a capital case.

You say that 1 in 3 black men in the U.S. under 30 is in jail, on probation or on parole. Is this the scariest stat?

I think the newer statistic that 1 in 3 black males born in 2001 is expected to go to jail or prison during their lifetimes is more astonishing because it’s about the future. And 1 in 6 Latino boys. That wasn’t true in the 20th century.

The Huntsville Times posts, "'Slavery didn't end; it evolved,' Bryan Stevenson of Equal Justice Initiative tells 'Daily Show' host Jon Stewart," by Kay Campbell.

Because Americans have never understood the myths of their own history that made it possible to have slavery, "Slavery didn't end; it evolved," Alabama's Bryan Stevenson told Jon Stewart during the Oct. 16, 2014, "Daily Show."

Stevenson, the founder-director of the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, is one of the keynote speakers for the upcoming conference in Huntsville, Exploring Faith Intersections, Nov. 2-3, 2014. Stevenson is also the author of "Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption," which will be released from Random House on Tuesday, Oct. 21. Stevenson told Stewart about a few of the cases he has been involved in with the EJI in freeing people who had been unjustly accused in were blatant disregards for legal procedure.

Earlier coverage of Bryan Stevenson's book begins at the link.

A multi-city book tour kicks off October 22nd, at Washington, DC's legendary Politics & Prose.  You can order a signed book, and they will be happy to mail it to you after the event.

Scott Turow Speaks with Bloomberg Law

"Bloomberg Law: Author Scott Turow on the Death Penalty," is the audio conversation.  You can listen at the link.

Renowned author Scott Turow, a former federal prosecutor and a partner at Dentons, discusses recent challenges to the death penalty and botched executions. He has worked on behalf of death row inmates pro bono and is a former member of the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment. He speaks with June Grasso on Bloomberg Radio’s “Bloomberg Law.”

More from Scott Turow is available at the links.

Christian Science Monitor Q&A with James Liebman

"'The Wrong Carlos': Was an innocent man executed?" features a Q&A with principal author James Liebman, at the Christian Science Monitor.  It's by Randy Dotinga.

By design, this book is not a masterpiece of storytelling. It won't keep readers up past their bedtimes or give them chills through thought-provoking prose.

Instead, "The Wrong Carlos" carefully lays out the basic facts of a botched murder investigation and prosecution. Many more details of the case are available on the book's website, providing perhaps the most extensive accessible record of an American death penalty case.

In an interview, lead author and law professor James Liebman talks about what went wrong, how his team uncovered the truth, and what this case means for the debate over the death penalty.
 
Q: What convinced you to investigate a specific death penalty case?
 
In 2000 and 2002, we published a big study which showed there was a huge amount of adjudicated errors found in capital cases in the United States by state and federal courts. Essentially, two-thirds of all death verdicts reviewed over a quarter century had been overturned based on serious error.

Proponents say the system is working, and we don't have to worry about the ultimate error of someone being innocent. There's another interpretation. If an airline company or a car company had this level of error, nobody would want to go near them. If there's this much smoke, there's got to be fire.

So we wanted to examine a particular case to see if we could determine the risk of executing the innocent. We went from a statistical study where we were just counting outcomes to making a judgement call about which cases would be interesting to look at.

Earlier coverage of the book begins at the link.  Related posts are in the books category index.

Dotinga conducted a similar interview with Evan Mandery, earlier this month.

National Law Journal Interview with Justice Ginsburg

"Justice Ginsburg Laments 'Real Racial Problem' in U.S.," is by Marcia Coyle of the National Law Journal.  Here's teh beginning and her comments on the death penalty.

The turmoil in Ferguson, Mo., and the controversial stop-and-frisk policy in New York City illustrate a “real racial problem” in America, one that recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions have done little to help, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told The National Law Journal.

The high court was “once a leader in the world” in rooting out racial discrimination,” the justice said in a wide-ranging interview late Wednesday in her chambers. “What’s amazing is how things have changed.”

And:

NLJ: Towards the end of their tenure on the court, justices Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens, and even later than that, Justice Lewis Powell Jr., decided they could no longer support the constitutionality of the death penalty. As we see increased problems with lethal injection, what are your thoughts now about the penalty?

GINSBURG: I’ve always made the distinction that if I were in the legislature, there’d be no death penalty. If I had been on the court for Furman [v. Georgia, 1972, invalidating the death penalty], I wouldn’t have given us the death penalty back four years later. Stevens and Powell were part of that. I think there wouldn’t have been a big fuss. There was a big fuss initially over the decision that stopped executions. If the court had stayed there, it would have been accepted. That was the golden opportunity. I had to make the decision was I going to be like Brennan and Marshall who took themselves out of the loop [by dissenting in every case upholding the penalty]. There have been some good death penalty decisions. If I took myself out, I couldn’t be any kind of contributor to those.

NLJ: After more than two decades on the court, what types of cases still vex or challenge you?

GINSBURG: Death penalty. For one thing, our jurisprudence is dense and then we have these contributions from Congress like AEDPA [Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act]. Because we had no death penalty in the District of Columbia, my first year here, I asked my clerks to write a memo so I could become familiar with where the court was on the death penalty. It was dense then and it has gotten only worse.

Related posts are in the Supreme Court category index.  More on Furman v. Georgia, at the link.

From Nevada

The Las Vegas Sun features a Q&A with Assistant Federal Public Defender Michael Pescetta, in, "A look inside Nevada’s death row with a federal defense attorney."  It's by Ana Ley.

Today, his office represents more than half of the 83 men sitting on death row.

Capital punishment has faced scrutiny nationwide in recent months after drug experimentation apparently led to a series of botched executions in three states. The topic should gain even more traction in the Silver State as officials scramble to assemble a mandated legislative audit of the state death penalty by Jan. 31, 2015.

Pescetta chatted with the Sun this week about the death penalty. His answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Earlier coverage from Nevada begins at the link.

Christian Science Monitor Conversation with Evan Mandery

"Death penalty ban: 'A Wild Justice' author Evan Mandery explains how the US adopted, and then discarded, it," by Randy Dotinga for the Christian Science Monitor.

Q: You focus on another case that – like Justice Goldberg – has been largely forgotten by history. This is the ruling in the case of McCleskey vs. Kemp, in which the court majority refused to heed statistics that suggested a pattern of racism against blacks in the use of the death penalty.

Why is this case vital to the story of the legality of the death penalty?

A: It was potentially the most important decision in history of Supreme Court other than Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education.

Justice Lewis Powell wrote the majority opinion in the 5-4 ruling, although at the end of his life he said he opposes the death penalty and regrets his decision. It's a challenge based solely on the issue of racism: The court said you needed an individualized showing of racism to invalidate the death penalty, which is basically impossible.

If one vote in that decision had gone the other way, it would have fundamentally transformed the entire justice system in America. The Supreme Court would have been saying that you couldn't use a punishment if there were racially disparate patterns.How would the court have restricted that just to the death penalty? I believe that's why the court didn't do that, that they thought the wheels would fall off the justice system.

Earlier coverage of Mandery's excellent book begins a the link.  You can learn more about McCleskey v. Kemp at the link.

Eric Holder on Lethal Injection Problems & Secrecy

Video of the PBS NewsHour interview with U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder is at the link.

"Eric Holder 'greatly troubled' by spate of botched executions," is by Lauren Gambino for the Guardian.

Speaking out for the first time since a botched execution in Oklahoma led to a Justice Department investigation, the US attorney general, Eric Holder, said on Thursday that death-row inmates should have the right to know what drugs the state is using to put them to death.

Holder told Gwen Ifill on PBS NewsHour that he is “greatly troubled” by the series of prolonged executions carried out in the US states of Ohio, Oklahoma and most recently Arizona.

"For the state to exercise that greatest of all powers, to end a human life, it seems to me, just on a personal level, that transparency would be a good thing, and to share the information about what chemicals are being used, what drugs are being used,” Holder said during the interview.

NBC News reports, "Attorney General Holder: Condemned Should Know Lethal Drugs," by Pete Williams.

Attorney General Eric Holder said Thursday that condemned prisoners have a right to know the composition and sources of the drugs to be administered in carrying out the death penalty.

His comments, during an interview with Gwen Ifill on the PBS NewsHour, come as the Justice Department is working to complete a study, ordered by President Obama in May, on the growing controversy over lethal injection.

And:

Attempts to use new combinations and dosages have resulted in botched executions in Ohio, Oklahoma, and Arizona.

State and federal courts have divided on whether those subject to the death penalty are entitled to know which drugs a state intends to use and where they came from.

"Eric Holder calls for more transparency in lethal injections," is by Alex Seitz-Wald for MSNBC.

“For the state to exercise that greatest of all powers – to end a human life – it seems to me, just on a personal level, that transparency would be a good thing and to share the information about what chemicals are being used, what drugs are being used,” he said.

The controversy over lethal injection comes in the aftermath of several botched executions, including a recent high-profile case in Arizona, in which the condemned man stayed alive for almost two hours after the injection.

“There might not be a legal requirement for transparency and just talking about or describing the drugs that are used. But we sometimes have to go beyond that which is legally required to do something that is right,” Holder told Ifill.

Earlier coverage of Arizona's botched execution begins at the link.

LA Times Interview with Judge Alex Kozinski

"Judge Alex Kozinski on bringing back firing squads: No, I wasn't kidding," is by Los Angeles Times columnist Patt Morrison.  Here's the first question of this must-read:

Were you being hyperbolic about firing squads to get our attention?

No, I was quite serious. We've had a lot of litigation about problems with [lethal] drugs. Meanwhile we are spending an immense amount of money and resources, and giving false hopes to the victims' families, and we don't really have a death penalty at all in California.

I never thought using drugs was a good idea. People who make the equipment, the drugs, the catheters — they're involved in lifesaving, not killing. Lethal injection in particular, it's all hands-on; they have to strap the body down, they have to put the catheter in, take the vital signs. It's a hard position for a doctor. If there's still a pulse or heartbeat, maybe they'll give more drugs to finish the job, so the doctor is put in a position of essentially helping them.

With a firing squad, you strap him down and leave him and somebody else does the shooting. The people doing the shooting don't have to see him up close; in fact, you don't even need people to pull the trigger anymore. You can have it triggered remotely.

Of course it does raise the question of whether we are really comfortable with having a death penalty that literally sheds blood. The thing about the drugs is that it's a mask — you're not really shedding blood. [But] it's just as violent, just as brutal.

Earlier coverage of Arizona's botched execution begins at the link.  You can also jump to news of Judge Kozinski's dissent, with a link to the dissent itself.

An Extensive Interview with George Ryan

"Ex-Illinois governor Ryan breaks post-prison silence, ready to work at ending death penalty," is by Michael Tarm of Associated Press, via the Daily Journal.  Here's the beginning:

George Ryan, an ex-Illinois governor and now an ex-convict, says he'd like to re-engage with the cause he left behind when he went to prison in 2007 — campaigning for the end of the death penalty in the U.S.

"Americans should come to their senses," Ryan said this week, in an hourlong interview with The Associated Press at his kitchen table.

Newly free to speak after a year of federal supervision that followed his more than five years in prison for corruption, Ryan appeared to have recovered some of his old voice and feistiness, in contrast to the subdued figure that emerged a year ago from the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, and ducked briefly into a Chicago halfway house.

At his home in Kankakee, south of Chicago, the 80-year-old Republican held forth on capital punishment, the state of American politics and the criminal justice system — though not the difficult details of his own corruption case.

He said he'd like to spend some time on the national circuit to encourage other states to follow Illinois' lead in abolishing capital punishment in 2011, which stemmed from Ryan's decision to clear death row in 2003. While he was treated as a champion by death penalty opponents at the time, he acknowledged some public figures now may have trouble openly associating with him.

Earlier coverage of George Ryan begins at the link.

A Q&A at the Harvard Gazette

"The death penalty and Christianity," is the inteview with Francis X. Clooney, conducted by Paul Massari for the Harvard Gazette.

The botched execution of Oklahoma death row inmate Clayton Lockett in April ignited a national discussion about capital punishment that was followed by fresh debate over the executions of three felons last week in Missouri, Georgia, and Florida.

Christians on both sides of the issue have been weighing in on capital punishment, saying that Scripture supports their position.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has argued that “the Bible clearly calls for capital punishment in the case of intentional murder.” But Christian activist and author Shane Claiborne has countered that the teachings of Jesus provide no support for the death penalty.

To add context and nuance to the conversation, Paul Massari of Harvard Divinity School Communications turned to Francis X. Clooney, Parkman Professor of Divinity and professor of comparative theology and director of the Center for the Study of World Religions at the School.

Related posts are in the religion category index.

Remembering Troy Davis - A Conversation With Jen Marlowe

In a little more than four months, we will note the third anniversary of the execution of Troy Davis in Georgia.  Already, friends and supporters of Troy are planning events for September 21.

I recently had a Q&A with Jen Marlowe, the co-author of I Am Troy Davis. 

Q)  This must have been an emotionally difficult book to write.  Not only was Troy Davis executed; your co-author - Troy's sister - died shortly after his execution.

A)  Writing this book was definitely one of the most difficult tasks I've ever undertaken. Not only was I immersing myself in the pain of three people I loved dearly whose loss I was still deeply mourning (Troy, Martina, and their mother Virgina who passed a few months before Troy was executed)--but I wasn't able to collaborate with the very people whose story I was trying to tell. So--it was difficult on both the emotional and practical levels.
 
Q)  Is the judicial process equipped to handle post-conviction review of actual innocence cases?  I think that people believe that every aspect of a death penalty case gets a fresh, top-to-bottom review by different levels of courts, but the reality is much more compartmentalized.

A)  From what I've seen, it seems to me that no, the judicial process is not equipped to handle review of innocence cases. Once a defendent is found guilty, getting evidence of innocence even reviewed is an uphill battle, let alone meeting the often impossible bar of "proving" innocence. The appeals process is really about whether there was constitutional errors at trial--not about reviewing the merits of an innocence claim. Appellate courts seem most concerned with procedural issues. 
 
Q)  With DNA exonerations pointing to failed eyewitness identifications, there a much greater awareness that innocent people get wrongly convicted.  We've seen several cases get attention, but nothing like the level of Troy's case.  Why do you think it captured so many people's attention?

A)  I think there are many reasons Troy's case captured the attention that it did, but largely because his case was so emblematic about what is so broken about the death penalty system. The enormous problems in his case were so clear, and so egregious--that it attracted the attention of, first, human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and the NAACP, and then, the media, leading to public outrage. The fact that there were 4 execution dates also gave time for a movement to really grow around Troy's case, a movement that grew in strength, numbers, and outrage each time Troy survived a near-miss. And, it can't be overlooked--Troy's family was a central reason that Troy's case broke through at all. Not every wrongfully convicted prisoner has advocates as passionate and relentness and articulate and determined as Troy had in his sister Martina and the rest of the Davis family.
 
Q)  Troy Davis went to his death with extraordinary grace.  Is that part of why his memorial service was so moving?

A)  I think Troy's going to his death with such extraordinary grace is due to the extraordinary grace that Troy possessed as a human being--and it was this grace that drew so many people to him, that made so many people want to champion his fight. This grace emanated from the entire Davis family. So, I think the connection between that grace and the memorial service was absolutely there--but not just the grace of Troy's parting the world. It was the grace with which Troy lived in the world.
 
Q)  In so many ways this is not simply Troy Davis' story, but the stories of a multi-generational family.

A)  Absolutely, and that's exactly the point. The death penalty has a human impact on real human lives. I wanted to reveal that human impact by showing how Troy's situation affected this multi-generational family--a family that I hope readers grow to know and care about through the pages of the book.
 
Q)  And of another family, as well.  What can you tell us about the MacPhail family, and their reactions?

A)  I can't tell much more about Mark MacPhail's family other than what is already in the book, though I wish very much that I could. I approached Mark MacPhail's mother twice (through a letter and over the phone) and asked if they would be willing to participate in the project, and to talk to me more about Mark as a human being--the son/brother/husband/father that they lost. I wanted very much for Mark MacPhail to be portrayed in his full humanity, and for the pain of the MacPhail family to be honored and treated compassionately. After all, Mark MacPhail was the first victim from the events set into motion that led to the execution of Troy Davis. Unfortunately, Mrs. MacPhail said she didn't want to participate in the book, and said her family felt the same way. I wish the MacPhail family peace, and I hope they never know another tragedy like that which they have already lived through.
 
Q)  Race and racism overlay capital punishment in America.  In many ways that relationship is very stark, such as the fact that 80% of American executions happen in the Old South.

A)  Absolutely. Race impacts all parties of the death penalty system. Race of the victim plays a role in who gets sentenced to death, as does race of the accused, and race of the jury. Race in sentencing (whether captial cases or not) was determined by the US Supreme Court im the 1989 decision McClesky v. Kemp to be an "inevitable" aspect of our criminal justice system. I believe that we should not accept that it is "inevitable". If race plays a pervasive role in our criminal justice system--which we know that it does--then we must find fundamental ways to address this.
 
Q)  As we move to the third anniversary of Troy's execution, what do you see as the lasting impact of this case?

A)  I hope that the lasting impact of Troy's case and Troy's legacy will be that it both reveals our country's broken death penalty system, and the human impact of that system. That is why we are calling for people all over the country to mark the 3rd anniversary of Troy's execution on Sept 21 by hosting Community Book Club events, so that I Am Troy Davis will be a part of expanding and deepening our national conversation about the death penalty. More information about that action is below.

September 21, 2014: Host a Community Book Club Event with I Am Troy Davis

On September 21, 2011, the state of Georgia put Troy Davis to death despite a compelling case of innocence. To mark the 3-year anniversary of this travesty of justice, and to deepen and widen the discourse about the human impact of the death penalty system, we invite you to participate in a worldwide Community Book Club on September 21, 2014.

We find that people who may be uncertain about their views on the death penalty, and may not want to come to a rally, vigil or other public event, are more willing to attend a small, private gathering to discuss a book they were asked to read. Through hundreds of intimate gatherings across the country and the world, Troy's story will reach thousands of new people who may not (yet!) be involved in the movement to abolish the death penalty.

To host an event, you need only:

1. Invite a group of friends, family and colleagues to read I Am Troy Davis ahead of September 21, 2014. These can be death penalty abolition activists, those who are uncertain about their views about the death penalty, those who support the death penalty, or a combination. (If you are already part of a regularly meeting book club, this can be your September book. Or, it can be any of your friends/colleagues you wish to invite for this one-time event.)

2. Invite that same group of friends, family and colleagues to gather on (or around) September 21 to discuss the book. (This can happen as a potluck dinner at a home, in a coffee shop, in connection with an existing church or synagogue book club, at your local independent book store, etc)

3. Use the I Am Troy Davis Discussion Guide developed by Equal Justice USA, in partnership with Amnesty International USA and the NAACP to facilitate the conversation around the book, or develop your own discussion questions!

4. We want to keep track of all the book discussions happening around the world! Register your event by emailing Jen Marlowe at: donkeysaddle @ gmail.com

5. Take photos of your event to be posted on tumblr, linking your event to similar book events that will take place that day all over the world!

Earlier coverage of the book begins at the link.

New Republic Conversation with Deborah Denno

"The Evolution of the Death Penalty in One Map," is by Lane Florsheim at the New Republic.  There is an infographic at the link.  Here's an excerpt from the beginning of the conversation:

Lane Florsheim: Your paper “Lethal Injection Secrecy Post-Baze” catalogs the numerous issues with lethal injection as an execution method. Are the drawbacks of lethal injection at odds with the public’s perception of the method?

Dr. Deborah Denno: I think the public is becoming more educated about the drawbacks of the method, because there’s been so much media coverage about these lethal injection challenges. That said, I still think there’s quite a bit of public ignorance about all the problems associated with lethal injection. Most people are used to seeing these pictures of an inmate serenely on a gurney, looking like the inmate’s going to sleep. I think that for the most part that might be the larger public perception. And we all know, that person is paralyzed, at least the people who are sort of ensconced in this issue. It’s hard to know, but I think that might still be the overwhelming public perception.

LF: Why do states that have seemingly prioritized finding a “humane” execution method for more than a century take measures to conceal problems with lethal injection like non-traditional drug sources and shifting protocols?

DD: Because what they’re doing actually conflicts very much with the effort to find a humane method of execution. I mean, it’s a catch 22.

Related posts are in the lethal injection category index.

Lethal Injection Roundup

Andrew Cohen writes, "America Is Terrible at Killing People Legally," for Politico Magazine.

Herbert Smulls, a convicted murderer, was put to death by Missouri officials while his final appeal was still being considered by the United States Supreme Court. The process by which lethal drugs were pushed into the condemned man’s veins began at 10:11 p.m. Missouri officials told me last Friday that they proceeded with the execution, despite the pendency of an appeal, because there were no stays in place at the time and because the justices in Washington had repeatedly rejected Smulls’ requests for a stay in the hours leading to his death. Smulls was pronounced dead at 10:20 p.m. In figuring that the Supreme Court would again decline to stop the execution, Missouri guessed correctly this time. The Court denied Smulls’s final stay request at 10:24 p.m. He was dead four minutes before his legal rights were exhausted. Death penalty experts, people who have spent decades working on capital cases, were mortified. It’s just not supposed to happen that way.

This is just the latest episode suggesting a level of chaos, a form of lawlessness even, in the administration of the death penalty in America. Other examples abound and include the continued execution of the “mentally retarded,” (an outdated term the Court continues to use) which was supposed to be outlawed by the Supreme Court in 2002 but which is occurring anyway. Another example lies in the Court’s lax standards, and negligible oversight, in evaluating capital cases involving prosecutorial misconduct or ineffective assistance of counsel. In Texas, even the correctional officers’ union is calling for improved conditions for death row inmates while lawmakers in states like Virginia and Missouri (and others) are considering the return of firing squads and electric chairs. Through inaction or indifference, the justices have signaled to state officials that they can push envelopes in capital cases they would not have pushed five or 10 years ago.

The most litigious current example of this phenomenon surrounds the use of secretive new approaches by state officials in Missouri, Louisiana, Texas and elsewhere to hide critical information about the drugs they want to use to execute inmates. This lack of transparency raises profound constitutional questions and yet so far the justices have been unwilling or unable to provide answers. Thus we have entered a newly unsettled era of death penalty law—unsettled even by the contentious standards of modern death penalty jurisprudence—that requires judicial oversight. The Supreme Court must act now to bring order to this growing chaos.

Democracy Now posts, "Execution Chaos: Witnesses Say Executions Are Botched As States Use Untested, Secret Drug Cocktails," with Amy Goodman.  There is video at the link.

 As drug companies refuse to let their products be used for the death penalty, states are using untested drug combinations that have resulted in deaths like that of Dennis McGuire in Ohio, where the state used untested two-drug method despite warnings it might cause immense suffering. We speak with the reporter who witnessed the execution, and with a lawyer for a man executed in Missouri with an entirely different lethal drug cocktail, made by a pharmacy the state refused to name.

And:

We speak with Alan Johnson, reporter with the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio, who witnessed McGuire’s execution and says he observed him gasping for air, and that he appeared to be choking. We are also joined by Cheryl Pilate, one of the lead attorneys for Herbert Smulls, who was executed Jan. 29 with a lethal dose of pentobarbital that was made by a compounding pharmacy the state refuses to name. Also joining is is Megan McCracken, attorney with the University of California, Berkeley School of Law’s Death Penalty Clinic, where she is an expert on lethal injection methods.

"New complications in executions bring new death penalty discussions," is by Patricia Zapor of Catholic News Service.  It's via the Boston Pilot.

International law, the risk of using inhumane methods of execution and opposition to capital punishment by the survivors of murder victims are among issues that are bringing fresh energy to debate about the death penalty.

In mid-January, Father Lawrence Hummer, of St. Mary's Catholic Church in Chillicothe, Ohio, witnessed the execution of Dennis McGuire for the 1989 rape and murder of 22-year-old Joy Stewart, who was 30 weeks pregnant.

A week later, publications around the world were printing the priest's account of watching what he called an inhumane procedure in which the convicted murderer struggled for 26 minutes while a previously untested mixture of drugs was used to execute McGuire.

At about the same time, the execution of a Mexican citizen drew international attention and warnings from the U.S. State Department that the refusal of the State of Texas to review the man's conviction in light of an international court ruling might put U.S. citizens at risk while traveling abroad.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, the parents of a prison guard who was beaten to death by an inmate in 2002 are battling the county prosecutor for the right to be heard at the retrial of the man who previously confessed to killing their son.

"States that actually murder by the death penalty," syndicated columnist and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff's latest.  It's via the Columbia Daily Herald.

While some states have ended the death penalty, it still persists in others, and capital punishment remains a federal death sentence.

Indeed, a shocking (and, to me, sickening) lead editorial in The New York Times last week revealed the means that certain states use to continue creating death penalty corpses. These states viciously violate not only the Constitution, but also the most basic American rules of law and our most profound national values.

How many of us know what those are?

Deserving at the very least a Pulitzer, this editorial explained how certain remaining death penalty states “hide the means by which they kill people”

 Earlier coverage of Herbert Smulls' execution, Andrew Cohen's earlier writing on Missouri's rush to execute, Ohio's botched execution of Dennis McGuire, Texas execution of Edgar Tamayo Arias, and Bob Autobee's demonstration in Colorado, at the links.

Related posts are in the lethal injection index.

Bobby Jindal on Louisiana's Death Penalty

The Louisiana governor appeared on CNN's State of the Union yesterday, making news in his interview with host Candi Crowley.  Here's the section of transcript dealing with the scheduled execution. 

CROWLEY: And finally, governor, in Louisiana, the last I saw, there will be the execution of a man next week by lethal injection. He was found guilty of murdering his six-year-old step-son.

You are using in this lethal injection the same two chemicals that are now under scrutiny because of an Ohio execution where the man being executed was -- we were told it took ten minutes for him to die, writhing in convulsion. Are you comfortable with this execution going forward with this method of killing him?

JINDAL: Candy, three things. One, we're actually in front of federal court. We've submitted the two-drug protocol. A federal judge where in front of federal court district court as well as United States Supreme Court. So, the judge will have to decide whether we're allowed to proceed to fulfill the court's verdict. I will say this, we are looking at and we will likely support legislation in this session to give the Department of Corrections more options.

We have obviously -- we actually have a different protocol. We weren't able to use. We weren't able to get that drug, a one-drug protocol. So, we're likely to go to the legislators this year to ask them to give the Department of Corrections other options. Like many states, we're not always able to find and secure these drugs.

And so, we're going to go back to the legislature and say give us additional options. Where we stand with the execution that's coming up, we're in front of federal court. The Department of Corrections feels confident making make that case to the judge that this is a fairway to carry out the verdict of the court.

New Orleans Times-Picayune coverage is, "Jindal talks immigration, marijuana and the death penalty on CNN." by Julia O'Donoghue.  There is a link to the video.

"Bobby Jindal: New death penalty drug that takes 26 minutes to kill is ‘fair’," is by David Edwards at Raw Story.  It also excerpts the video.

Earlier coverage from Louisiana begins with the preceding post.

Andrew Cohen on 'A Wild Justice'

"Why a Fair Death Penalty May Never Be Fair," is Andrew Cohen's latest post at the Atlantic.

The biggest news of 2013 about the death penalty in America did not come from a court of law or from one of the nation's death rows. It did not come from the public pronouncements of earnest conservatives who one after the other came out in favor of abolition. It came instead from a Gallup poll released in October that revealed that public support for capital punishment is at its lowest ebb since November 1972—at 60 percent.

That date is significant. Ten months earlier, in January 1972, the United States Supreme Court had invalidated the nation's capital punishment statutes (but not the death penalty itself) in Furman v. Georgia. The resulting public backlash, Evan Mandery writes in his excellent new book about the topic, helped push the Court to reverse course. By 1976, under the thin guise of "reformed" capital laws, and under political pressure after an increase in crime rates, the justices brought back the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia.

That November 1972 polling figure from Gallup—57 percent approved the death penalty that month-- was but a brief marker on an upward trail that saw support for capital punishment reach 80 percent in 1994. But it has descended ever since. There are many reasons for the drop.

And:

Although the individual protections contained in the Bill of Rights never should be dependent upon the whims and caprices of majority rule, public opinion and the death penalty have always been inseparable. Mandery's work, titled A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America, is an important reminder of that link. There is no other way to say it but this: The Supreme Court 40 years ago blinked on capital punishment—blinked because of the public outcry at the very notion of eliminating the death penalty by court order rather than by the political process.

And in blinking, in their zeal to cobble together a majority that would permit executions, the justices who gave us our modern capital jurisprudence failed to adequately articulate a legal theory that supports the death penalty in the context of the Eighth Amendment's protections against "cruel and unusual" punishment. Supporting a practice that embodies the most irreversible act our government can do in our name, this is a baffling vacuum in constitutional law. And yet it persists, 40 years after the Court was supposed to have "fixed" the nation's capital laws.

Earlier coverage of A Wild Justice begins at the link.  You can also jump to coverage of the Gallup polling.

Also available, more from Andrew Cohen.

Former President Jimmy Carter Renews Dialogue on Capital Punishment

The Guardian posts, "Jimmy Carter calls for fresh moratorium on death penalty," by Ed Pilkington.

Former US president Jimmy Carter has called for a new nationwide moratorium on the death penalty, arguing that it is applied so unfairly across the 32 states that still have the death sentence that it amounts to a form of cruel and unusual punishment prohibited under the US constitution.

In an interview with the Guardian, Carter calls on the US supreme court to reintroduce the ban on capital punishment that it imposed between 1972 and 1976. The death penalty today, he said, was every bit as arbitrary as it was when the nine justices suspended it on grounds of inconsistency in the case of Furman v Georgia 41 years ago.

“It’s time for the supreme court to look at the totality of the death penalty once again,” Carter said. “My preference would be for the court to rule that it is cruel and unusual punishment, which would make it prohibitive under the US constitution.”

Carter’s appeal for a new moratorium falls at a time of mounting unease about the huge disparities in the use of capital punishment in America.

Pilkington will be one of the moderators at tomorrow's ABA National Symposium on the Modern Death Penalty in America, being held tomorrow at the the Carter Center in Atlanta.

Earlier news of the symposium begins at the link.

Continued Coverage of 'A Wild Justice'

CNN posts, "New book chronicles epic court fight over capital punishment," by Bill Mears, CNN's Supreme Court Producer.

Some 1,348 people have been executed by the state since 1976, when the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume after a four-year moratorium. Twenty-eight were given lethal injection this year, three over the past several days.

While the annual number of executions and death sentences continue to drop nationwide, it remains a legally and socially acceptable form of justice for aggravated murder in 32 states.

But a new book reveals how the high court four decades ago was on the verge of eliminating the death penalty permanently.

Evan Mandery's "A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America" (Norton) is a stunning insider's look at the legal and social forces dividing the justices during turbulent times.

The Crime Report posts, "Q & A, A Wild Justice," by Cara Tabachnick.

TCR:  Much of the decision-making around capital punishment was driven by politics. How, and why, do the personalities of the Court affect the public?

EM: First of all, I think it’s important that the Court not be treated as if it’s the only institution in the world that isn’t driven by personalities. The written history of the Supreme Court is based almost entirely on the published opinions of the justices, which really are very grossly imperfect proxies of what the justices actually think about the cases.  

How does it affect America? The answer there is a legal realism behind all the decisions of the Supreme Court. It would be very useful for people to acknowledge and not pretend anything other than that the Justices are nine human beings who make decisions based on their social standing, their moods, their class, their personal background and all of the other things that lead people to have different opinions on different days, instead of treating the Court like some sacrosanct religious organization.

I’m not saying anything new. I’m just demonstrating legal realism in a different way, but almost every lawyer recognizes this. That law isn’t given from God. That law is interpreted and interpretation is a subjective experience. Are the justices cognizant of that? Many explicitly are. William Douglas was a very influential legal realist at Yale during his formative years there. Byron White was a legal realist. Some conservative judicial ideologies make the pretense of formalism (which is the opposite of realism). So if you’re Hugo Black or Anthony Scalia and you say that the role of Justices is to measure law against the original meaning of the constitution, then you are engaged in a different exercise. You’re not judging as a socially situated actor; you are operating according to a formula. The decision to adopt that a (certain) mode of judicial interpretation is a  choice that you make as a socially situated actor. Even  interpretation of the original meaning of the constitution involves subjective judgment. Most of the Justices acknowledge it. Many acknowledge it explicitly, but some resist it.

Earlier coverage of Evan Mandery's A Wild Justice begins at the link.  Related posts are in the books category index.

Deutsche Welle Q&A with Amnesty International

"'Death penalty abolition has a way to go'," is the Deutsche Welle interview with Jan Erik Wetzel of Amnesty International.

The strongest argument against the death penalty seems to be that innocent people could end up being convicted - and ultimately killed - for crimes they didn't commit. For instance, in the case of Maryland, DNA evidence exonerated former death row inmate Kirk Bloodsworth who then was released from prison after eight years. Do you know of similar cases?

Amnesty International opposes the death penalty in all circumstances, whether the person is innocent or guilty. If the person is guilty, after a fair trial, he or she should be given a prison sentence that is commensurate with the crime conducted. The death penalty is never applicable, because there should never be an end to hope for that particular prisoner.

We do know that since 1973 over 140 people have been exonerated in the US. However, only 18 of these have been exonerated due to DNA evidence showing and proving innocence. So DNA is not really the solution to all of this either. Quite often faulty witness statements, quite often police brutality [have] contributed to death sentences and unfair trials. So we think if these various mistakes want to be avoided, the death penalty needs to be abolished as such.

Related posts are in the death penalty in other countries and international category indexes.

Fresh Air's Interview with Evan Mandery

"Years After Historic Ruling, Execution Still A 'Random' Justice," is a segment from NPR's Fresh Air featuring an interview with the author of A Wild Justice, conducted by Dave Davies.  Audio is at the link.  The 37 minute interview is a must-listen.  A transcript is also available.

Here's the opening:

Evan Mandery, welcome to FRESH AIR. You know, you write in this book that the Supreme Court had addressed the death penalty only six times in its first 175 years. And then Justice Arthur Goldberg and a young clerk named Alan Dershowitz decided to do something about this. I guess this was in the '60s. Tell us how they proceeded.

EVAN MANDERY: Well, in 1963, when my book opens, there's basically nobody in the United States other than Goldberg and Dershowitz who thinks that the death penalty might be unconstitutional. This is unfathomable to us today, right. Regardless of whether you support the death penalty or not, you understand that that issue is debatable.

But in '63, no one had this position, and Goldberg proposed to take a case, to grant certiorari in a case and raise the constitutionality of the death penalty, even though it hadn't been raised by the litigants. It was an act without precedent in American judicial history.

Earlier coverage of the book begins at the link.  Related posts are in the books category index.

More on Evan Mandery's A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment in America, from the publisher - W.W. Norton - and from Amazon.

NLJ Interview with Rob Warden

The National Law Journal interviews Rob Warden, director of Northwestern University School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Conviction, as he prepares to retire.  "Four Decades and 60 Exonerations Later…," is the title of this must-read conducted by Karen Sloan.

The National Law Journal: You’re a journalist and not a lawyer, so how did you initially get involved in investigating wrongful convictions?

Rob Warden:  The whole innocence movement was really started by journalists—lawyers weren’t paying much attention. I’m proud of the fact that I happened to be one of the first. I had been an investigative reporter and a foreign correspondent and editor, in various capacities, at the Chicago Daily News. I later worked for The Washington Post. Then I had the opportunity to start a legal publication called the Chicago Lawyer.

This was in the aftermath of Watergate, and it had occurred to me that investigative reporting had focused heavily on the executive and legislative branches, but not on the third branch. Even though everything is recorded, it seemed to me that somehow it is the least accessible to the general public. I set out with Chicago Lawyer in 1978 to investigate wrongful convictions, which I had sort of known were a serious problem that had been overlooked.

NLJ: How did the Center on Wrongful Convictions come about?

Warden: In the years when I was editor and publisher of Chicago Lawyer, we exposed almost 20 wrongful convictions, including those of six people who had been on death row and were ultimately exonerated. Through that capacity, I had developed relationships with people at Northwestern University, principally professor Lawrence Marshall, who was interested in these cases. We worked together and we started a conference in 1998. It was called the National Conference on Wrongful Convictions and the Death Penalty.

We brought to a single stage at Northwestern 29 people who had been exonerated and released from death rows around the country. It really was kind of an amazing event. I remember sitting there with my wife, and there was a jam-packed auditorium and people giving a standing ovation to people who had been exonerated in cases where they had been sentenced to death. I thought, “Hey, we can abolish the death penalty.” And we basically went from there. The Center on Wrongful Convictions was an outgrowth of that conference.

Related posts are in the exoneration, innocence, and journalism category indexes.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Remain on the Court

The Sunday New York Times reported, "Court Is ‘One of Most Activist,’ Ginsburg Says, Vowing to Stay," by Adam Liptak.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 80, vowed in an interview to stay on the Supreme Court as long as her health and intellect remained strong, saying she was fully engaged in her work as the leader of the liberal opposition on what she called “one of the most activist courts in history.”

In wide-ranging remarks in her chambers on Friday that touched on affirmative action, abortion and same-sex marriage, Justice Ginsburg said she had made a mistake in joining a 2009 opinion that laid the groundwork for the court’s decision in June effectively striking down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The recent decision, she said, was “stunning in terms of activism.”

Unless they have a book to sell, Supreme Court justices rarely give interviews. Justice Ginsburg has given several this summer, perhaps in reaction to calls from some liberals that she step down in time for President Obama to name her successor.

On Friday, she said repeatedly that the identity of the president who would appoint her replacement did not figure in her retirement planning.

Related posts are in the Supreme Court category index.

More on the Catholic Mobilizing Network

The Religion News Service posts "7 Questions: ending the death penalty," by Michael J. O'Loughlin. He interviews Karen Clifton. Here is the begining.

Karen Clifton is the executive director of the Catholic Mobilizing Network, a Washington, DC, based Catholic group that seeks to apply the Catholic Church’s pro-life mission to the abolition of the death penalty in the US.

Michael O’Loughlin: Your group, Catholic Mobilizing Network, fights to end the use of the death penalty. How does this fit in to the Catholic Church’s very active pro-life movement?

Karen Clifton: The death penalty is a pro-life issue. By educating Catholics on the death penalty, we close the loopholes on all of the life issues. If we can come to believe that those who have done heinous crimes have the right to life and redemption, it is logical to believe the innocent have a right to life. Abolishing the death penalty is a means of changing the mindset of our culture from using violence to solve problems.

MO: Federal authorities may seek the death penalty against the alleged Boston marathon bomber, accused of killing 4, including a child, and injuring hundreds. Why should this person, and those who commit heinous crimes, be spared?

KC: Putting the Boston marathon bomber to death is not going to bring any of the four people who were sadly killed back to life. Two wrongs are not going to make a right, and using the death penalty just increase the violence. His death would just teach that killing justifies killing. Another way to think about it is, how does killing someone show that killing others is wrong? As a Catholic, I believe in redemption, which is all in God’s time.

Earlier coverage of the Catholic Mobilizing Network begins at the link.  Related posts are in the activism and religion category indexes.

Q&A with Catherine Jarboe

The National Catholic Reporter's Conversations with Sr. Camille posts, "Woman advocates repeal of death penalty as part of unconditional pro-life policy."  It's conducted by Sr. Camille D'Arienzo.  Here's the beginning of this lengthy interview:

Catherine Jarboe, 45, is director of Catholic state networks and organizations for Catholic Mobilizing Network (CMN) to End the Death Penalty. Its mission is to proclaim the church's unconditional pro-life teaching, especially in its application to capital punishment and restorative justice. I began our conversation by asking what this job entails.

Jarboe: CMN works to prepare Catholics for informed involvement in campaigns to repeal state death penalty laws and expand or inaugurate restorative justice programs. Ending the death penalty is a state issue, so we work to lift up the Catholic voice in the movement state by state, and we're making progress. Six states in six years have passed repeal legislation, and in each state, Catholics were at the vanguards. We're a ministry of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet against the death penalty and a lay collaborative of the USCCB.

Related posts are in the activism and religion category indexes.

A Death Before Dying

That's the title of a new white paper issued this morning  by the ACLU.  It's subtitled, "Solitary Confinement on Death Row."  Brian Stull, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU’s Capital Punishment Project, is the author.

In most U.S. prisons, solitary confinement for death-row prisoners is routine. The conditions — tiny cells, forced inactivity, little or no human contact — are so damaging to mental and physical health that some death row prisoners ask to be executed ahead of schedule, just to stop the torment.

“A Death Before Dying” describes the horrors inherent to solitary confinement, conditions that amount to an extra punishment for those sentenced to death. Today death-row prisoners spend more than a decade in solitary. In 2010, the most recent year for which we have data, those executed in the U.S. had spent an average of 14.8 years in solitary confinement.

There is more on the report, including video, at the ACLU Prison Conditions website.

Brian Stull was kind enough to participate in a Q&A on the report.

Q.  How prevalent is solitary confinement (also called administrative segregation) on state death rows?

A.  Our survey revealed that 93% of States lock away their death-row prisoners alone in their cells for 22-24 hours per day, which fits a basic definition of solitary confinement. 

Q  Are solitary confinement conditions on death row substantially different than non-death row solitary confinement?

A.  No.  The survey and report show that they are substantially similar if not virtually identical. In at least some states, such as your home state of Texas, the physical plant at the Polunsky Unit was designed specifically to lock away in solitary confinement prisoners who had proven dangerous or had repeatedly broken the rules.  The prison houses death row and non-death sentenced prisoners in identical units.

Q.  It seems that there is the beginning of a national awareness that extended solitary confinement Is extremely hurtful to the mental health of inmates.  As more scientific evidence of the mental health harm becomes available, do you see this being deemed a cruel and unusual punishment?

A.  Absolutely.  The studies consistently show that solitary confinement causes mental illness in healthy people and exacerbates it in already mentally ill people.  And, when this crazy-making confinement is tied solely to sentence with no consideration of a prisoner’s conduct, it causes gratuitous and needless pain and suffering on prisoners who were sentenced only to die.  And this punishment comes while they are still appealing (some end up being innocent).  This is certainly cruel and unusual punishment and the courts will hopefully one day recognize that.

Related posts are in the incarceration category index.

LA Times Interview with Jim Willett

"As Texas nears 500th execution, ex-warden reflects on prison system," is the Los Angeles Times report by Molly Hennessy-Fiske.

Next week, Texas is scheduled to execute its 500th prisoner since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Barring stays or reprieves, the 500th execution is due to occur Wednesday — and the inmate is a woman.Kimberly McCarthy, 52, a former occupational therapist, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1998 in connection with the beating and stabbing death of her 71-year-old neighbor during a robbery. She was originally scheduled to be put to death Jan. 29, but received a stay until April, and then saw her execution postponed again. Her attorneys recently appealed again to halt the execution, but there has been no decision yet.

McCarthy would be the 13th woman executed in the U.S. and the fourth in Texas since the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976. During that time, more than 1,300 men have been executed nationwide.

Texas has enforced the death penalty more regularly than any other state, executing more people than the next six states combined (Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida, Missouri, Alabama and Georgia).

And:

To learn more about the history of executions in Texas, which are carried out at the Walls Unit at Huntsville Prison, about 70 miles north of Houston, we talked to the director at the local Texas Prison Museum, Jim Willett, a former warden.

Earlier coverage of the sceheduled execution begins at the link.

Democracy Now Examines Duane Buck Case

"Prosecutor Seeks Stay of Execution for Texas Prisoner Duane Buck, Sentenced to Death for Being Black," is the Democracy Now report with Amy Goodman.  There is audio at the link.

Although Duane Buck’s guilt is not in question for the 1995 murder of his former girlfriend Debra Gardner and her friend Kenneth Butler, critics say jurors in his case were led to choose a death sentence over life without parole based on testimony of a state psychologist who argued that African-American criminals are more likely to pose a future danger to the public. We’re joined by two guests: Linda Geffin, the second-chair prosecutor who helped win Buck’s death sentence in 1997, but now opposes his execution, and Christina Swarns, an attorney with Duane Buck’s legal defense team and director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Criminal Justice Project.

Here's an excerpt from the interview:

For more, we go to Houston, where we’re joined by Linda Geffin, second-chair prosecutor who helped win the death sentence for Duane Buck in '97. She now opposes his execution. She is currently senior assistant prosecutor in Harris County attorney's office. And here in New York, we’re joined by Christina Swarns, attorney who’s part of Duane Buck’s legal defense team. She is the director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Criminal Justice Project.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Linda Geffin, let’s go to you. You helped convict Duane Buck. He ended up with the death penalty, being sentenced to death. Why have you changed your view on his case right now?

LINDA GEFFIN: Fourteen years after the trial, I saw on the Internet the offensive testimony in black and white. And when I had the opportunity to read it and to really absorb what it was saying, it was so—I had so much clarity that it was racially offensive, it was egregious, and it was error. So I emailed Mr. Buck’s lawyer and asked how I could help.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about what that quote was. I’ll read a comment Dr. Quijano made to The New York Times. He said, quote, "I was asked a question whether there is a relationship between race and violence or dangerousness. The literature suggests that there is a correlation. So I had to say yes." He added, "It’s not because of the blackness of the person that is causing the violence. It is what goes with it. Poverty, the exposure to lack of education, exposure to criminal elements." Let’s go to our guest right here in New York, Christina Swarns. Your response to that?

CHRISTINA SWARNS: Well, I think Dr. Quijano made quite clear that what he believed and what the state was looking for him to say was that because Mr. Buck was and is African American, he posed a future danger to society. And the prosecution, in cross-examination, elicited that testimony. They then went on to argue specifically that point during closing argument. What the prosecutor said in closing was: Dr. Quijano testified that he would pose a future danger, and that—on that basis, you should find that he is a future danger, and he should be sentenced to death. I would go on to say that, as The New York Times reported, Dr. Quijano’s opinion, of course, about this is false: There isn’t a real connection to support a future dangerousness finding.

Earlier coverage of Duane Buck's case begins at the link.  Related posts are in the race category index.

Justice Ginsburg on Capital Punishment

ReutersLegal posts, "The would-be diva," by Anna Louie Sussman.

United States Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has a reputation as an opera lover; she’s seen frequently at the Washington National Opera and has even made cameos in two of its productions. In fact, she says in an interview with the WQXR radio program Operavore, she would have preferred to be an opera singer than a lawyer. 

Justice Ginsburg tells host and mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne that her career in law was a reluctant second choice.

“People ask me, ‘If you could be whatever you want to be, what would you be?’ And my first answer is not, ‘A great lawyer.’ It is, ‘I would be a great diva.’ But I totally lack that talent, so the next best thing is the law,” she said.

She also compared ruling on death penalty cases to the plight of Captain Edward Vere in Billy Budd, who is forced to obey the letter of the law and sentence Budd to hang, despite his doubts about Budd’s guilt. While she has said before she finds death penalty cases very difficult, she has also refrained from declaring them all unconstitutional.

“If I had my way there would be no death penalty. But the death penalty for now is the law, and I could say ‘Well, I won’t participate in those cases,’ but then I can’t be an influence,” she said.

You can listen to the archived audio of the February 2nd edition of WQXR-FM's Operavore, "Law and Order on the Opera Stage."

On today's program, the highest art in the land meets the highest court: presiding mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne talks with Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a noted opera fan who has even appeared onstage in cameo roles. "If truth be told, lawyers and law do not come off very well in opera," she explains.

"Justice Ginsburg: ‘If I Had My Way, There Would Be No Death Penalty’," is Ian Millhiser's post at Think Progress.

Josh Blackman's Blog pulls more from the interview, "Justice Ginsburg on the Death Penalty and Being a 'Great Diva'.”

Q: But it’s not the law in every state:

RBG: No, but it is the law in most states. Well over half states.

Q: I don’t want to get too involved in this. How does this translate to the highest Court?

RBG: There is a question about the fairness of the trial. Maybe the prosecutor failed to disclose exculpatory evidence. Maybe the defendant was not mentally competent. These are the issues that come to us.

Interestingly, RBG would not take the approach that Justices Brennan and Marshall did–that the death penalty was always unconstitutional. Yet, their position became marginalized because they perpetually dissented.

More on Justice Ginsburg and capital punishment at the link.  Related posts are in the Supreme Court category index.

A Q&A with Sr. Helen Prejean

"Activist discusses work against death penalty," is the conversation with Houston Chronicle reporter Harvey Rice.  Here's the beginning of this must-read:

Sister Helen Prejean, 73, anti-death penalty advocate and author of "Dead Man Walking," which was made into a movie in 1995 of the same name, was in Houston for the 10th anniversary of GRACE, the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, which represents low-income death-penalty defendants at no cost. She spoke with Houston Chronicle reporter Harvey Rice about her passion for her cause.

Q. Was it your experience with Patrick Sonnier, whose 1984 execution inspired your book "Dead Man Walking," that led you to be outspoken against the death penalty, or was it something else?

A. When he was killed in the electric chair he looked at my face. I had never seen an execution before with my own eyes. I went outside and vomited. Support for death penalty was 87 percent at the time. I realized the people are never going to see this, but I've witnessed it. I've witnessed the guards who had to do the killing. One who said I have to quit. I met the victims' families. They are given this illusory promise (that the death penalty will bring them closure.) I began speaking out immediately after that execution. I wrote a book, "Dead Man Walking." It was to get the word out to the people, to get them to face the reality of the death sentence, to gradually take them into the horror. That's what I tried to do.

More about Sr. Helen Prejean is at the link; you can also visit her website, Prejean.org.

Damien Echols' Book, Life After Death

"After Jail and Release, New Fame as an Author," is a New York Times report by Dave Itzkoff.

On a Thursday afternoon walk along Canal Street, Damien Echols was reflecting on how this busy thoroughfare once nourished him in the first few months after his August 2011 release from a super-maximum-security prison in Arkansas.

Arriving from a life spent largely in solitary confinement and awaiting a death sentence, Mr. Echols was starved for human interaction and feasted on this downtown Manhattan smorgasbord teeming with awed tourists, stubborn natives and street peddlers hawking unfamiliar wares as if it were a five-course dinner.

Now, however, Mr. Echols compared this same block to a far less appetizing meal: “A sack full of McDonald’s hamburgers,” he called it.

It’s not that Mr. Echols, 37, one of the defendants in the notorious West Memphis Three murder case and the author of a new memoir, “Life After Death,” has become tired of a frantic, indifferent city or jaded by his own long-sought, hard-won freedom.

But after a year on the outside he finds himself an unlikely and uncomfortable celebrity. He is famous mostly because of things for which he does not want to be recognized, yet he is unable completely to shun the spotlight he says he needs to win himself a full exoneration.

“You can have all the evidence in the world, and that’s still only 50 percent of the fight,” said Mr. Echols, who speaks in a soft but resolute voice. “The other 50 percent is media. You have to get the media to pay attention. If not, they’ll sweep it under the rug and keep going.”

Tall and lean with long black hair, Mr. Echols is most widely known for having been convicted in 1994, along with Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., for the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis, Ark., a crime the three men say they did not commit. Last year Mr. Echols, Mr. Baldwin and Mr. Misskelley were released, after almost 20 years, in a deal that required them to plead guilty even though they continue to maintain their innocence.

Since then Mr. Echols has lived a bifurcated existence. He has become well known from the three “Paradise Lost” documentaries, directed by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, that chronicled the West Memphis Three case, and he has spent time with several of the entertainment-world luminaries who fought for his release and have helped finance his exoneration efforts, including Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder and the “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson. (Mr. Jackson and Mr. Echols are also among the producers of a coming documentary, “West of Memphis.”)

But Mr. Echols says his private life is happily mundane. He and his wife, Lorri Davis, live in Salem, Mass., a city with long connections to magic and the dark arts that has become a modest mecca of New Age shops and meditation centers; he calls it “the only place on earth where I’m in the majority.”

"Freedom After Fire Ants and Tumult," is the Times' book review by Janet Maslin.

Eighteen and a half years after he was sentenced to death for participating in the murders of three 8-year-old boys in Arkansas, Damien Echols finds himself in Faireyland. Mr. Echols’s new book, “Life After Death,” has a Shepard Fairey-inspired cover design that’s as coolly lionizing as Mr. Fairey’s “Hope” poster for President Obama. The book has a champion in Johnny Depp, who has compared Mr. Echols’s writing to Dostoyevsky’s. And his story is the subject of a forthcoming documentary, “West of Memphis,” even though that story has been exhaustively told in the three “Paradise Lost” films that paved the path to Mr. Echols’s release from death row.

These are mind-bending new circumstances for a guy who grew up as an impoverished loner, sardonically described himself as white trash, and spent his years of incarceration noticing the most grotesque, dehumanizing aspects of prison life. Yet “Life After Death” tries to reconcile all these extremes into a single narrative, and to a great extent it accomplishes this magic trick. By the way, Mr. Echols spells that word “magick,” just as one of his favorite writers, the very spooky Aleister Crowley, did. It was Mr. Echols’s teenage taste for the occult, heavy metal and black clothing — a look inspired by Mr. Depp in “Edward Scissorhands,” he says — that initially made him a target for the vindictive and provincial police in West Memphis, Ark.

“Life After Death” does not discuss the details of that triple murder case and the long, botched investigation and trial that followed. For one thing, that story is not over. Last summer Mr. Echols, now 37, and his two cohorts in what became known as the West Memphis Three, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr., were freed on an Alford plea, an unusual technicality whereby the defendants were released but not vindicated. The accumulated fan support, financial backing and legal muscle that have rallied around Mr. Echols suggest that his champions will continue to fight on his behalf.

But he is sick of that story anyway. So “Life After Death” is a dual memoir, partly about Mr. Echols’s boyhood and partly about his prison life.

Tonight, Echols will be signing copies of his book in Tempe, Arizona.  "9/24: Damien Echols talks 'Life,' at Changing Hands in Tempe," is by Randy Cordova for the Arizona Republic, features a Q&A with the author.

As one of the West Memphis Three, Damien Echols spent nearly two decades on death row for the murders of three Arkansas Cub Scouts in 1993, a crime he says he didn't commit. Last year, due to a lack of evidence, the men were released amid a flood of publicity.

And:

Q: It must also be a shock because people see you in magazines with people like Johnny Depp and think, "Oh, he's living the life."

A: People see the glamour angle or some red-carpet thing with Johnny, but they don't know for the past month I've been homeless, and we've (he and wife, Lorri Davis) been struggling to get a place to stay. Tomorrow, we move to Massachusetts, but we've been moving from hotel to hotel or staying with friends. When we left Arkansas, we literally felt like refugees. I did not have one single penny in my pocket or a change of clothes. If it wasn't for people helping us and trying to get us on our feet, we would have been screwed.

Blue Rider Press, the book's publisher, has distributed a list of author events.

September 21 – New York, NY | Barnes & Noble, Union Square – 7:00 PM

September 24 – Tempe, AZ | Changing Hands Bookstore – 7:00 PM

September 26 – Los Angeles, CA | UCLA Freud Playhouse (Book Soup presents) – 7:00 PM

September 28 – Seattle, WA | Seattle Town Hall – 7:30 PM

October 11 – Minneapolis, MN | Innocence Project Minnesota – 7:00 PM

October 12 – Kansas City, MO | Rainy Day Books at Unity Temple – 7:00 PM

October 14 – Nashville, TN  | Southern Festival of Books

October 26 – Denver, CO | Tattered Cover LoDo – 7:30 PM

October 27-8 – Austin, TX | Texas Book Festival

October 29 – Tulsa, OK | All Souls Unitarian Church (Booksmart presents) – 8:00 PM

Earlier coverage of Damien Echols and the West Memphis Three case begins at the link; more on Life After Death, also available.

A View From the Trenches of Death Penalty Appeals

That's the title of Amanda Bronstad's report in the National Law Journal.

In May, Victor Stephens, who is black, pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the shooting of a white store owner. The plea, which came after he had been granted a new trial, brought a life sentence but removed him permanently from death row in Alabama, where he was first sentenced in 1987.

Stephens' attorney, J.S. "Chris" Christie Jr., is a partner at Bradley Arant Boult Cummings in Birmingham, Ala., and co-chairman of the firm's pro bono committee. According to Christie, Stephens was the third inmate the firm has gotten off death row since it began handling capital cases in 1988. Christie talked to The National Law Journal about Bradley Arant's death penalty work, for which the firm will receive an exceptional service award from the American Bar Association's death penalty project next month.

And:

NLJ: The firm has represented 19 people on death row in Alabama so far. How does that compare to the total number of people on death row in the state?

C.C.: Alabama has about 200 people on death row. The number changes. For example, Victor Stephens was taken off in May 2012, but two people were added. The exact number was 201, so about 11 percent of the people on death row.

NLJ: Of those 19 cases, one person was executed and two died in prison. Stephens is one of three people the firm has successfully gotten removed from death row. Talk about that case.

C.C.: This is something I worked on from 1993 to 2012. Victor Stephens in 1986 was part of robbing a convenience store. The store owner shot him and, while the store owner was reloading his gun, Victor Stephens shot the store owner with a .25-caliber pistol that he had. Victor Stephens confessed to shooting the store owner with a .25 pistol after being shot with a shot gun.

At his trial in 1987, he was convicted of capital murder. That night, they held a sentencing hearing. The jury recommended life without parole. The judge held the final sentencing until after he'd been nominated to the Court of Criminal Appeals and before the general election that fall, and sentenced Victor Stephens to death, overriding the jury's finding that he should be sentenced to life without parole. That went up through the normal appellate process and post conviction proceedings started — and that's when I got involved, in 1993.

NLJ: What was the legal argument that got him off death row?

C.C.: The argument on which he actually was awarded a new trial was on the jury selection. The prosecution used 21 of its 22 regular strikes, and its first 21 strikes were to remove blacks from the jury. His counsel made a timely objection, and the state offered what appeared to be race-neutral reasons for strikes of 21 blacks.

 Related posts are in the ABA and pro bono category indexes.

Trial Update on Connecticut Racial Bias Questions

"Death row inmates back holding trial in prison," is the Connecticut AP report, via the Day.

Connecticut death row inmates who are suing the state over alleged racial and geographic biases in the state's death penalty are supporting a plan to hold the trial in a prison instead of a courthouse.

Inmates' lawyers said in a court document filed Friday that the plan by state officials was "adequate." The plan calls for the trial to be held at Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, which houses death row, beginning in September and be broadcast via a live video feed to Rockville Superior Court so the public can watch.

The trial would be held in one of the prison's dayrooms, where each inmate and his lawyer would sit together at their own table.

Nine of the 10 men on death row are plaintiffs in the appeal. The state repealed capital punishment for all future crimes earlier this year.

Inmates objected to an earlier plan by the state to hold the trial in Rockville and allow them to watch video feeds in their cells.

The plan to hold the trial in the prison still needs approval by a judge. A hearing on issue is scheduled for July 25 in Rockville.

And:

Six death row inmates are black and three are white, when blacks make up only 10 percent of the state's population. Inmates' lawyers also say several inmates on death row were prosecuted in Waterbury, bolstering claims of geographic bias.

Earlier coverage of questions of racial bias in Connecticut's death sentences begins at the link.

Also from Connecticut, "Death row inmate says new law unfair," by AP writer Pat Eaton-Robb.  It's via the Wilmington News Journal.

Daniel Webb is awaiting execution for the 1989 kidnapping and murder of a Connecticut bank executive, but he believes he is also paying a price for another, unrelated crime that has heavily influenced the state's debate on capital punishment.

Webb told The Associated Press in a death row interview that he thinks there would be no capital punishment in the state if not for the public's desire to execute the men responsible for the 2007 home-invasion slayings of a mother and her two daughters in suburban Cheshire. The only survivor of that crime, Dr. William Petit, lobbied to keep the death penalty for the men who killed his family, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky.

"Dr. Petit is angry with them and with his anger he wants to kill all of us," said Webb, who spoke by telephone from behind a glass window. "Now you are trying to increase my suffering and take away the little that I had because you want to make Komisarjevsky suffer. That's not right."

Webb was sentenced to die for the slaying in Hartford of Diane Gellenbeck, a 37-year-old Connecticut National Bank vice president, who was taken from a downtown parking garage and shot to death near a local golf course as she ran from an attempted sexual assault.

The state legislature in April abolished capital punishment, but only for future crimes. Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and key state lawmakers had insisted on that as a condition of their support for repeal in a long-running debate that focused on the Petit case.

Earlier coverage of the racial bias lawsuit and Connecticut's repeal of the death penalty begins at the links.

Additional Miller v. Alabama Coverage

The Washington Post has an interview with Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, who argued the juvenile cases decided in Miller v. Alabama.

The intervew, "Bryan Stevenson, the man behind the juvenile justice cases decided by the Supreme Court," is conducted by Eva Rodriguez.  Here's a brief excerpt from this must-read:

Why did you get involved in these types of cases? Why do you feel so strongly?

Stevenson: I started representing children on death row 20 years ago, and I was struck by how desperately they wanted and needed mentoring, parenting, guidance. They were in every sense of the word “kids,” and that surprised me initially. . . . What I saw was that not only were they vulnerable and disabled and exposed in ways that adult clients weren’t, but they were also responsive in ways that adult clients weren’t. . . . The second thing was just seeing how exposed kids are in the adult system, how victimized, how brutalized.

Have you ever come face to face with a victim of one of your clients?

Tragically, I know more about victimization than I wish I knew. My grandfather was murdered when I was 16 by juveniles, four kids in a low-income project in south Philadelphia. Members of my immediate family have dealt with very serious crimes. It’s not a lack of awareness. We spend a lot of time with victims of violent crime. . . . I think we should be doing something radically better by people who are victimized by violent crime. But what we’ve done in the last 30 years is promised them revenge, mostly; we promised them blood and executions and extreme punishments.

We do very poorly in providing them with counseling and support and recovery or the promise of a new society where there’s going to be less crime because we’re doing something constructive to help people who are at risk or hopeless or marginalized.

I also think that the opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice. And if we don’t commit in a complete way to justice for everybody, we risk perpetuating the dynamics that have been so injurious to American progress. And I do believe we should spend a lot more time thinking about how we treat people who are disadvantaged and disfavored in evaluating our progress, our decency, our character, because, ultimately, that’s how we’re going to be judged.

If a juvenile has committed the most heinous of crimes and the jury has adjudicated that individual guilty, why is it offensive to the Constitution for that juvenile to be subjected to a mandatory life without parole?

Children are different than adults. We recognize that children need extra protection. Their maturity, their judgment, their development doesn’t permit us to treat them like adults. That’s the reason why we don’t let even the smartest kids smoke or drink or vote or drive cars before they’re eligible.

We protect children under the law except in the criminal justice system, and in the last 30 years, we have essentially dropped the protections for kids, put them in the adult criminal justice system, where I think many of them have been really unfairly sentenced and condemned. . . . We do it mostly to kids who are poor and kids of color, and that makes this sentence “unusual.”

I believe that to say to any child that you’re only fit to die in prison is “cruel.” It’s true that some of these crimes are very disturbing, but it’s also true that the lives that many of these children have lived are also disturbing. They’re in many ways some of the most vulnerable kids in society, and we owe them more than to simply throw them away.

You can view Bryan Stevenson's Ted Talk, "We need to talk about an injustice," noted in this post.

There is additional news coverage of the ruling in the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Courthouse News Service, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, CBS News, CNN, MSNBC, and NPR.

Robyn Blumner on 'The Wrong Carlos'

Syndicated columnist Robyn Blumner writes, "When the state kills the innocent," for the Tampa Bay Times.  It's also available as, "Innocents have been executed via the Columbus Dispatch and Tribune Media Services.  It's a must-read.

If you’re reading this in a comfortable, middle-class home, what happened to Carlos DeLuna almost certainly could never happen to you.

But everyone should care about DeLuna’s story because it lays bare America’s broken “machinery of death,” to quote former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun. After decades on the bench, Blackmun finally stopped upholding death sentences. He said the potential for error is too great in a system “fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice and mistake.”

DeLuna was a poor Hispanic nobody with a criminal record who was executed in Texas for a crime he didn’t commit. The system in Texas does not go out of its way for people like DeLuna. He was put to death in 1989 for the 1983 knife slaying of Wanda Lopez at a convenience store where she worked in Corpus Christi.

When DeLuna was arrested a short time after the murder, there wasn’t even a microscopic drop of blood on his clothes or shoes, despite a crime scene where Lopez’s blood was splattered on walls and pooled on the floor. A man’s bloody footprint at the scene was never measured by detectives to find a match.

Had police, prosecutors or defense lawyers done their job, they would have uncovered evidence pointing to another man. Carlos Hernandez was a knife-toting violent felon who told multiple witnesses that he had committed the Lopez crime. Hernandez died in prison in 1999 of cirrhosis of the liver.

And:

In 2006, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argued that because mistaken convictions have been uncovered, America’s death penalty is justified. He declared with relish that the system of procedural safeguards actually works because no innocent person, “not one,” has been wrongfully put to death. If there has been, Scalia wrote, “we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.”

Excuse us, Justice Scalia, but here are two: Carlos DeLuna and Cameron Todd Willingham. These are two men whose stories should lead all of us to conclude, as Justice Blackmun did, that America’s death-penalty experiment has failed.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers interviews Columbia Law prof. James Liebman in a podcast.  You can listen at the link.

Earlier coverage Carlos DeLuna and the Columbia HRLR acticle is at the link.  You can read the full article at The Wrong Carlos.

Continued Coverage of the National Registry of Exonerations

The National Registry of Exonerations is beginning to garner editorials, and continuing to get focused attention.

"Hard truths about injustice," is the Dallas Morning News editorial.

Call it a graduate course on what can go wrong in the criminal justice system.

There are 891 case studies at present, and climbing.

That’s the number of individual cases listed so far in a new national project on cataloging and dissecting proven miscarriages of justice.

Called the National Registry of Exonerations, the project aims to build the first comprehensive listing of wrongful convictions in America so the public and professionals can learn the hard lesson of failure, then build a better system.

As with a similar, DNA-centered exoneration database maintained by the Innocence Project of New York, this one figures to be a good teacher. And Texas once again has an embarrassingly prominent presence.

So be it. This state needs to have its dirty laundry laid out as often as possible if that’s what it takes to overcome skepticism that things have been just fine the way they are inside Texas’ halls of justice. We know that’s not the case.

"A new National Registry on Exonerations casts doubt on the accuracy of our criminal justice system," is the title of a Birmingham News editorial.

How many people wrongfully convicted of a crime are we willing to accept? Especially those who are sentenced to Death Row?

A report released Monday by the National Registry on Exonerations raises those questions and more. The registry, a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, profiles 873 exonerations from January 1989 through February 2012. The report discusses including at least 1,170 other defendants whose convictions were dismissed after more than a dozen major police scandals. Most of those scandals involved the massive planting of drugs and guns on innocent defendants, which led to "group exonerations."

And:

Of the 16 state exonerations in Alabama, six were men sentenced to death. It does not require a vivid imagination to wonder whether a wrongly convicted person awaits execution on Alabama's Death Row or, worse, whether the state has killed an innocent person in our names.

If someone goes to prison for a crime he or she did not commit, it is an injustice. That is especially true in capital murder cases, where a life is at stake. We would like to have as much confidence in Alabama's criminal justice system as Strange professes, but the report on the national registry casts enough doubt to cause grave concern.

The Week magazine bundles, "25 years of wrongful convictions: By the numbers."

891 - Specific wrongful conviction cases detailed in the National Registry of Exonerations

93 - Percent of the exonerated convicts who are men

50 - Percent who are black

10.7 - Average time, in years, from conviction to exoneration

10,000 - Combined time, in years, the 891 exonerated prisoners spent behind bars

2.3 million - People incarcerated in the U.S. 

1,170 - Convicted defendants cleared in 13 "group exonerations" since 1995, following large police-corruption scandals, usually involving planted drugs or guns

416 - People exonerated of wrongful homicide convictions

UMichigan Law prof Sam Gross, co-founder of the Registry, is interviewed on NPR's All Things Considered, "Exoneration List Shows Patterns In False Convictions."  It's conducted by NPR's Audie Cornish.

And, to start, Professor Gross, this registry contains information about, I guess, 2,000 exonerations since 1989, but do you know if that's really a comprehensive list?

SAMUEL GROSS: No, it's not. It's incomplete in two senses. It doesn't include all the exonerations that occurred. It includes those we've been able to get information on. And, second, and really more important, even if we could get information on all the exonerations that have occurred in the United States in the past 20-some years, that would only be a small fraction of the people who were innocent but convicted of serious crimes, despite their innocence.

CORNISH: So, of these 2,000 cases that you talk about, you have almost 900 cases, roughly, that you have the most detail about. And one thing I found interesting is that it wasn't DNA, necessarily, that exonerated all of these people.

GROSS: That's right. If you ask somebody on the street about exonerations, the next word out of their mouth will almost certainly be DNA and that's because DNA exonerations, which started in 1989, have gotten a lot of attention and for good reason. They've taught us a lot about the criminal justice system and they provide a type of scientific evidence of innocence that is very powerful.

But DNA exonerations have always been a minority of the exonerations that occur and the more we learn about exonerations that don't get as much attention, the more non-DNA exonerations we find out about.

Exoneree Franky Carrillo and Sam Gross were guests on MSNBC Politics Nation with Al Sharpton.  Carrillo spoke about his own experience with wrongful conviction and exonerations.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

At Huffington Post David Protess posts, "Meet the Exonerated."  He's president of the Chicago Innocence Project.

Other findings were more nuanced. Notably, exonerations were spread across 43 states, but were most prevalent by far in three states: Illinois, New York and Texas. These states together accounted for one-third of the country's exonerations. Cook County and Dallas County led the way with 114 exonerations between them.

But why? While the knee-jerk reaction is to shout "corruption," the reality is good news more than bad. As the researchers indicate, these areas have been at the forefront of the national innocence movement, with dedicated lawyers, investigators, journalists and even college students engaged in exposing wrongful convictions since the 1990s. In the last five years, the D.A. of Dallas County has remedied injustice in 19 cases, some in collaboration with the local innocence project.

It is reasonable to conclude that if the loosely affiliated public interest groups were to bring their model to populated counties like San Bernardino (Calif.), Fairfax (Va.) and Bergen (N.J.) -- none with an exoneration since 1989 -- the problem of wrongful convictions would suddenly surface.

Another relevant issue is the death penalty. Seven of the 10 states with the most exonerations also had among the highest death row populations. Although fewer than 0.1 percent of prisoners are sentenced to death, 12 percent of exonerees had been condemned. Once again, the death penalty has been a priority of the innocence movement, and many dramatic exonerations have helped to change the conversation about capital punishment in America.

Earlier coverage of the National Registry of Exonerations begins at the link.

Continued Coverage - 'The Wrong Carlos'

Former Texas Governor Mark White writes, "Texas must take steps to ensure guilt in capital cases."  His OpEd appears in the Houston Chronicle.  White currently co-chairs the Constitution Project's Death Penalty Committee.

As governor of Texas during the early 1980s, I oversaw 19 executions. I was certain that the executions I oversaw involved guilty individuals, based on the best information available at the time, just as I am sure my successor was certain of guilt in the execution of Carlos DeLuna.

But now, a comprehensive investigation by Columbia University law professor James Liebman and his students suggests that Texas may well have executed the wrong Carlos.

And:

While Texas has certainly taken some steps forward since 1989 with regard to eyewitness identification reform and other innocence-related issues, the problems that plagued DeLuna's case continue to plague criminal - including capital - convictions in our state and across the nation. DeLuna's case should give us all pause as we realize that the possibility of executing an innocent individual is very real. And it should strengthen our resolve to ensure that convictions, particularly capital convictions, are accurate.

If we are going to continue to execute individuals, we must be absolutely certain of those individuals' guilt. Texas must implement best practices when it comes to criminal investigations and trials.

The eyewitness identification reform bill that the Legislature passed last year is one positive step, and I'm hopeful that jurisdictions around the state fully adopt and implement best practices in accordance with the legislation. Texas must also go beyond the steps it has already taken to examine other areas in need of reform, such as providing adequate defense counsel for the poor, reforming crime labs and revising the rules governing what evidence prosecutors must turn over to the defense.

I continue to believe some crimes are so heinous, some actions so abhorrent, that society is justified in demanding the perpetrator's life be forfeit. But I also believe if Texas is going to continue to impose the death penalty, we must take every possible precaution to ensure there is never another Carlos DeLuna.

San Antonio's alt-weekly, SA Current, has an interview with Columbia Law professor Jim Liebman, "Columbia Law School team publishes anatomy of a wrongful South Texas execution."  It's conducted by Michael Barajas.

Until the day Texas executed him in 1989, Carlos DeLuna insisted another Carlos stabbed and killed 24-year-old Wanda Lopez at a Corpus Christi gas station in February 1983. At trial, prosecutors dismissed the idea, calling the other Carlos “a phantom” that didn't exist.

More than two decades after DeLuna's execution, Columbia University law school professor James Liebman and a team of his students have gathered a trove of evidence they claim shows DeLuna was innocent of the crime, publishing the findings last week in a 400-page e-book and in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review's spring issue.

And, one of the questions and answer:

What's the impact of an investigation like this? What can it teach us when looking at capital cases today?

I think the most important thing is to make us recognize the risk we take. There is a real risk of executing the innocent in these capital cases, and that's why it's so important that this case is no different from many, many others we see. It's not an unusual case. Nobody had identified it anywhere near the time of execution as one that we ought to be worried about. There are a dime a dozen cases like this. And so right now where there's a big debate taking place across this country, when a number of states have abolished [the death penalty], with California's big referendum coming up, people should be asking the question: What do we get out of this penalty that we don't get out of, for instance, life without parole? And with what risk and at what cost? We feel this book really demonstrates the risk and the cost: the worst kind of risk out there. We feel it demonstrates that there is a very real risk even in this kind of run-of-the-mill case.

There's nothing about this case where you can say, “Oh we don't do it that way anymore,” or, “That just doesn't happen anymore.” As I say, the defense attorneys were not the strongest in the world but this is not the worst case of ineffective assistance out there. You see similar cases out there everyday across the country, Texas and elsewhere. Prosecutors did not turn over all of the evidence, but there are many cases where you see even worse examples of that. The appeals were quick, but that's not unusual. Like I said, in many ways this is a very run-of-the-mill kind of case even for today. It's the way cases go today. And so the real risk of an innocent person being executed that we found in this case is a real risk that the system continues to take as long as it's prepared to execute people.

"Texas killed the wrong Carlos," is a New York Daily News OpEd written by Shawn Crowley and Andrew Markquart.  Both participated in the Columbia HRLR project, Los Tocayos Carlos,

Other details about the shoddy investigation shocked us. The witness told police the man fleeing the station after Lopez’s murder looked like a transient, wore a disheveled sweatshirt and had a mustache. Police records show that the clean-shaven DeLuna wore a white dress shirt and dress pants that night.

According to the witness, the attacker violently wrestled with Lopez as she bled to death, casting a mist of blood spatter, streaks and pools all over the tiny clerk’s area. But forensic analysis showed that DeLuna’s body, clothes, shoes and fingernails had no blood on them.

The Corpus Christi D.A.’s office has since lost the physical evidence from the investigation. Lost along with it was the potential for the kind of DNA analysis that has exonerated nearly 300 prisoners in recent years.

All of this happened not in the 1920s or even the ’50s, but in the ’80s. And the flaws in our system that led to DeLuna’s death have not been mended. Readers can review our work and decide for themselves what happened. But we are convinced: America must come to grips with the reality of wrongful execution — and decide whether we value the death.

Earlier coverage of Carlos DeLuna and the Columbia HRLR article begins at the link.  All coverage is in the Carlos DeLuna category index.

Two Interviews With Jim Liebman

The Texas Tribune posts, "James Liebman: The TT Interview," conducted by Brandi Grissom.  There is video at the link.

Now, more than two decades after DeLuna's execution, Columbia University law school professor James Liebman and a team of students have uncovered evidence they say proves that Carlos DeLuna was innocent, and that Carlos Hernandez not only was real but was probably the real killer. They released their findings in a book-length monograph and website published by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review on Tuesday.

"I'm convinced that no jury could possibly have convicted Carlos DeLuna beyond a reasonable doubt on the evidence here. That's absolutely clear," Liebman said in a videotaped interview with the Tribune from Columbia University in New York. Liebman discussed the lengthy in-depth investigation that the team conducted, which he said revealed that Hernandez had a long history of violent crimes, that police worked too fast, that important leads were never followed and that, in the end, even DeLuna's execution may have been botched. "Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong," he said.

And:

Carlos DeLuna protested his innocence until his death. At his execution, the Rev. Carroll Pickett, the death house chaplain, said DeLuna asked if he could call him Daddy and held the pastor's hand as long as he could.

"I fully believe that Carlos DeLuna was an innocent man, and I will always believe that," Pickett said.

At the Guardian, Ed Piklington writes, "Wrongful execution of Carlos DeLuna: highlights from our Reddit discussion."

Issue 3: How did a Columbia investigator uncover in a day what Texas police weren't able to find in six years?

Liebman: If you don't look hard, you won't find, and I fear that this is a case where the responsible people didn't look hard because they believed that they had quickly arrested the right man. As sometimes happens, minds closed before the evidence was in.

Pilkington: Yes. When I read that I nearly fell off my chair.

Issue 4: Will public opinion be affected?

Liebman: There is a vibrant debate about the death penalty in the US just now and the public is paying close attention. We wrote this article so it could provide information on that debate to the public in a very accessible way. I have faith in the facts and in the public's ability to make reasoned judgments on matters of policy over time. And it takes time. In fact, public opinion on the opinion has changed dramatically over the past 15 years in the US and it has had an impact. Juries are imposing one-third as many death sentences each year now, compared to 1999.

Earlier coverage of the case of Carlos DeLuna and the Columbia HRLR article begins with the preceding post.  All coverage is in the Carlos DeLuna category index.

Michael Morton's Conversation With Chuck Lindell

Austin American-Statesman journalist Chuck Lindell broke the story of new developments in Michael Morton's case that led to his exoneration.  He's still covering the story, and the Statesman has published a two-day series, "Free to Speak;" a wide-ranging conversation between Morton and Lindell.  There is video at the links below.  It's a must-read.

"Morton can look back on pain and prison, but lives in peace," is the first part of the interview

Morton's arrival in prison immediately drove home the seriousness of his new situation.

Standing in a line of inmates wearing only prison-issued boxer shorts, Morton said he counted 13 stab wounds on the back of the man in front of him. Suddenly, the advice imparted from a longtime inmate at the county jail made perfect sense: "Keep your mouth shut and your eyes open."

Morton had to learn to stand up for himself. There were confrontations, but nothing worth discussing today, he said.

"It had its rougher moments. But most of prison is boring and monotonous and stupid and disrespectful," he said. "That's not me being some kind of elitist. Everyone inside complains about it."

Knowing he was innocent added "a little bit of emotional baggage," Morton said. "But I was no different than a guy who was completely guilty, because prison is prison. ... You go through the same stuff, deal with the same people.

"I'm not saying I didn't feel crushed. In the early days when I was new, I admit there were some nights," he said, his voice trailing off. "I heard some guys weeping, almost howling like dogs. I never had that. I wasn't that uncontrollably devastated. But there were nights when I silently wept.

"When everything has been taken away, or what you think is everything at that point, it can feel awfully brutal."

"Morton describes painful fight for freedom, how he started anew," is the conclusion.

Williamson County District Attorney John Bradley, at the time convinced of Morton's guilt, opposed his bid for DNA tests on evidence that had been preserved, including a bloody bandanna discovered behind the Mortons' house.

It would take an appeals court order in 2010 to move the testing forward.

And:

Morton became eligible for parole in 2007, 20 years after entering prison, and again in 2010. Both times Bradley opposed his release, and both times Morton was denied.

In prison, Morton said, everybody knows that the key to parole is to admit your guilt and show remorse.

A 2009 letter from Bradley to the Parole Board drove the point home. "Ask Michael Morton if he has accepted responsibility for the murder of his wife by mercilessly beating her to death. If he tells you that he now acknowledges he committed that crime, please notify me and I will reconsider my opposition to his parole," Bradley wrote.

But Morton said making up a confession was never an option. Almost everything of value had been taken away from him. All that remained, he said, was his innocence.

"I was not going to lie to get out," he said.

Earlier coverage of Michael Morton's exoneration and what has followed begins with this post.

Michael Morton Talks to Brandi Grissom

"Michael Morton Talks About Ordeal, Hopes for Future," is the title of Brandi Grissom's post at the Texas Tribune.

In the months since he has been out of prison, Morton said, he has been inundated with kindness and gifts, hugs from strangers who wish him well and pleas for forgiveness from some who believed in his guilt. For him, those expressions, after decades of being treated like a villain, have been the most welcome surprise.

“Everybody, no matter what the setting, they want love and affirmation,” he said. “It’s one thing to want it, it’s another to get it.”

He has also restarted a relationship with Eric, who is married and has a daughter named Christine Marie, after his mother. The reunification has been a slow process for Eric, now 28. But Morton said he understands and respects his son’s concern for his adoptive family, who must also now learn to deal with the realization that he is innocent.

Morton said he is grateful that his sister-in-law raised Eric to be a loving, responsible and smart father, husband and son. When he met Eric at a recent family gathering, Morton said, during a few moments they had alone, his son asked about his mother. They both cried.

“There was no one I would rather spend my life with than his mother,” he said. “And that kind of got both of us.”

As he rebuilds his relationship with Eric, Morton is also working on another important objective: finding accountability for the men whose actions led to his wrongful conviction and imprisonment.

Morton was profiled on the CBS News program, "60 Minutes," on Sunday.  That's where earlier coverage begins.

Craig Watkins on the Rivas Execution

D Magazine posts the interview, "Dallas DA Craig Watkins on Witnessing His First Execution."  It's by Zac Crain, and it appears in the April issue.

D Magazine: You didn’t prosecute the Texas 7 case. Why did you feel the need to go to George Rivas’ execution?

Watkins: I will tell you why. I have to make a determination on whether or not a person will be eligible for the ultimate punishment. So the reason I went was because I have experienced all aspects of capital punishment, but I hadn’t experienced the end, and so I needed to experience that. So I can be very sensitive in the decision-making process when I make a determination if a person is eligible for the ultimate punishment. I needed to experience all aspects of it. That’s why I did it.

And:

D Magazine: What’s your ultimate goal regarding the death penalty?

Watkins: The broader issue is, look, I have walked 25 men out of prison for crimes they didn’t commit. We have gotten this case in Williamson County, where the DA withheld evidence, or it’s alleged that he withheld evidence. Because of that, a guy spent 25 years on death row. The Supreme Court of Texas has instituted a court of inquiry to look into the actions of this individual. At the time he was DA; now he is a judge. You have got the Todd Willingham case. We have had all of these folks who have been exonerated that were on death row throughout our nation.

And so my concern, basically, is, look, we are seeking the ultimate punishment against someone, and we need to have all the safeguards in place to make sure that we don’t wrongly execute someone. And I think with all the evidence that we have seen, I think anyone that does not come to the conclusion that a person has been executed in this country for a crime they didn’t commit is being irresponsible. So that’s my position. Like I said, I can argue from my moralistic standpoint all day, but that’s not where the argument should be had. It should be one of logistics. Are we making mistakes? Do we need to reevaluate the process to make sure we are not making mistakes?

Earlier coverage of Craig Watkins begins at the link.

A Craig Watkins Interview

At the Dallas Morning News Opinion blog, Rodger Jones posts, "Craig Watkins on Craig Watkins," highlighting a KXAS-TV interview with the Dallas County District Attorney.

I recommend watching a very good interview that Channel 5 reporter Randy McIlwain did with District Attorney Craig Watkins this week. It was after Watkins went to Huntsville to witness the execution of Texas Seven ringleader George Rivas on Wednesday.

The interview lasts more than 30 minutes, and it's worth a listen if you care about justice, politics, history, the morality of the death penalty - you know, important things.

It's also a powerful interview on an emotional level. Watkins describes the other thing he went to Huntsville to do: find the grave of his great-grandfather, who was executed for a rape-murder-robbery in 1932. He found that headstone in the prison cemetery.

Watkins was in Huntsville to witness last week's execution of George Rivas. 

The complete Watkins interview is available through KXAS-TV, and is embedded in Jones' DMN post.

Earlier coverage of Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins begins at the link.

Craig Watkins Seeks Death Penalty Review

There's more today from the Dallas County District Attorney, following an interview with AP.

"Texas DA seeks death penalty review," is the AP interview, via CBS News.  Here's an extended excerpt:

The Texas prosecutor leading an aggressive push to free wrongly imprisoned inmates, in a county where more than two dozen wrongful convictions have been overturned, is calling for a review of the capital punishment system in the nation's busiest death penalty state.

Craig Watkins' tenure as Dallas County's top prosecutor has earned him a national reputation. Now, as Watkins publicly acknowledges that his great-grandfather was executed in Texas almost 80 years ago, he called on state lawmakers to review death penalty procedures to ensure the punishment is fairly administered.

"I think it's a legitimate question to have, to ask: 'Have we executed someone that didn't commit the crime?'" Watkins said in an interview with The Associated Press.

After becoming district attorney in 2007, Watkins started a conviction integrity unit that has examined convictions and, in some cases, pushed for them to be overturned. Dallas County has exonerated 22 people through DNA evidence since 2001 — by far the most of any Texas county and more than all but two states. An additional five people have been exonerated outside of DNA testing. Most of those exonerations occurred during Watkins' tenure.

Texas has executed 55 inmates since 2009, including 13 last year, a 15-year low. Twelve former death row inmates have been freed since 1973.

"I think the reforms we've made in our criminal justice system are better than any other state in this country," Watkins said. "But we still need reforms. And so, I don't know if I'm the voice for that. I just know, here I am, and I have these experiences."

Among those experiences was hearing about the execution of his great-grandfather, Richard Johnson. According to state criminal records and news accounts, Johnson escaped from prison three times while serving a 35-year sentence for burglary, and he was charged with killing a man after his third escape. He was convicted of murder in October 1931 and executed in the electric chair in August 1932.

Watkins said he did not get a full explanation of what happened until he became district attorney. His grandmother, who was a young girl when her father was executed, still struggles with the story, according to Watkins and his mother, Paula.

Watkins says he opposes the death penalty on moral grounds but doesn't want those beliefs "pushed upon someone else." He has sought the death penalty at trial in nine cases, with eight death sentences received. An additional four death penalty cases are pending, according to his office. A panel within his office reviews possible death penalty cases and votes on whether to pursue it.

Today's Dallas Morning News reports, "For Dallas DA Watkins, views on death penalty may be changing again."  It's by Ed Timms and Jennifer Emily.

Long before he divulged that his great-grandfather was executed by the state, Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins struggled to define his views on the death penalty.

And that extraordinary revelation, made in passing at a news conference on Wednesday, may signal that Watkins is at it again.

Whether his philosophical pendulum is swinging back to his nearly lifelong opposition to the death penalty, or will come to rest at some point short of that, remains to be seen. But there’s little question that his remarks will re-energize debate about capital punishment and scrutiny of Watkins’ performance as the county’s top law enforcement officer.

The Dallas Morning News reported Watkins’ disclosure that “people don’t know that my great-grandfather was executed by this state” online Wednesday and in Thursday’s newspaper, but Watkins balked at explaining his reasons for making the information public.

He told The Associated Press in a story distributed Thursday that he was calling on state legislators to review death penalty procedures to ensure the punishment is fairly administered.

He called for reforms. “I don’t know if I’m the voice for that,” he told the AP. “I just know, here I am, and I have these experiences.”

He hinted at a similar role for himself in April 2008, after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection while at the same time one justice called for a national debate on the morality of the death penalty.

Watkins, the first black elected district attorney in Texas, told The News that the spark for such a debate “is going to come from someone in a district attorney’s seat.” Whether the second-term Democrat’s shifting record on the death penalty might detract from his role as a voice for reform is a question yet to be answered.

State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, a senior member of the Senate committee on criminal justice, said in a statement released Thursday that he favored scrutiny of the death penalty.

“I think more and more Texans — and people all over the country — are taking another look at the death penalty. I don’t foresee a time when major changes will occur, but the discussion has at least begun on how we make it more just and how we make it more certain that we actually have the right guy.”

"Dallas DA reveals his great grandfather was executed for a Wichita Falls murder," by Lynn Walker for the Wichita Falls Times Record News.

A murder that happened in Wichita Falls 81 years ago is now causing a ripple through arguments over the death penalty in Texas.

A judge in Dallas on Wednesday exonerated a man who spent 14 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. Richard Miles, 36, was freed after evidence surfaced that another person committed the murder.

At that court hearing, Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins expressed serious concerns over the use of the death penalty in Texas. Then Watkins dropped a bombshell — his great grandfather had been sent to the electric chair for committing a murder in Wichita Falls.

“We need to take a look at capital punishment as it relates to if we’re doing the right thing,” he said. "There’s a personal side of me. People don’t know that my great grandfather was executed by this state. And so that’s an issue we need to explore as it relates to our justice system — are we doing the right thing?”

Watkins’ great grandfather, Richard Johnson, was one of two men convicted in a killing that happened Sept. 9, 1931 on a sparsely-housed stretch of Dayton Street west of Brook Avenue.

Earlier coverage of Dallas District Attorney Craig Watkins begins at the link.

Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory - Tonight on HBO

The third and final installment of the documentary on the West Memphis Three case premieres on HBO tonight.  Check your local listing for times. Here's the trailer:

 

A discussion with the directors:

 

And a panel discussion involving lawyers in the case:

 

Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert writes, "West Memphis 3 finally go free in latest ‘Paradise Lost’ documentary."

When the documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” played on HBO in 1996, it left little doubt that the three young men convicted of the crimes were innocent. When “Paradise Lost 2: Revelations” came out in 2000, it left less doubt. Now it is 2011 and a third film, “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” shows them being set free in August 2011 after 17 years in jail. One of them was on Death Row.

The case of the West Memphis 3 became famous worldwide. The Dixie Chicks held a fund-raising concert to help pay for the accused’s defense. The original conviction was based on flawed circumstantial evidence and a confession obtained from Jessie Misskelley, one of the defendants, who had an IQ of 72 and was questioned by police for 12 hours without a parent or attorney present, and then tape-recorded only long enough to recite a statement he later retracted. A police transcript shows Jessie shifting the time of the crimes from morning to noon to after school to evening (when they actually occurred) under leading suggestions by police.

This latest documentary is the culmination of years of extraordinary persistence by filmmakers Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky, whose work helped to free the three men. So flawed was the evidence against the WM3 that the state of Arkansas decided to avoid a court hearing on their appeal by offering this unique deal: They could go free and could even state their innocence if they would sign an admission of guilt — a technicality shielding Arkansas from lawsuits for wrongful imprisonment.

“Lost 3” does a smooth job of retelling the entire story, so you needn’t have seen the first two films.

"How 'Paradise Lost' became a fight for justice," is by Lisa Rose for the Newark Star-Ledger.

Chronicling a controversial 1993 Arkansas murder case, filmmakers Bruce Sinofsky and Joe Berlinger evolved from observers into advocates.

Based in Montclair and New York respectively, they were dispatched by HBO to cover the trials of three teenagers accused of killing three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, a working class suburb.

The prosecution lacked eyewitnesses and physical evidence, so they built a case around a tale of teen rebellion curdled into devil worship and pedophilia. The alleged ringleader, Damien Echols, got the death penalty, while Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr. were sentenced to life without parole.

The team's 1996 documentary, "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills" raised questions about the convictions and in the process, spurred a protest movement to "Free the West Memphis Three."

Earlier coverage of the documentary begins at the link.

John Paul Stevens: The Vote He Would Take Back

"Retired Justice John Paul Stevens on His ‘Wrong’ Vote on Texas Death Penalty Case," is the title of George Stephanopoulos' post at ABC News.

Retired Justice John Paul Stevens is a man of few regrets from his nearly 35 years on the Supreme Court, except one – his 1976 vote to reinstate the death penalty.

“I really think that I’ve thought over a lot of cases I’ve written over the years.  And I really wouldn’t want to do any one of them over…With one exception,” he told me.

“My vote in the Texas death case.  And I think I do mention that in that case, I think that I came out wrong on that,” Stevens said.

 At the time he thought the death penalty would be confined “to a very narrow set of cases,” he said. But instead it was expanded and gave the prosecutor an advantage in capital cases, according to Stevens.

The retired associate justice has been an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, but his admission of that 1976 Jurek v. Texas vote comes at a time when the country appears to be revisiting its stance on the death penalty, in light of Troy Davis’ execution last week.

He writes in his book, “Five Chiefs,” that he regretted the vote “because experience has shown that the Texas statute has played an important role in authorizing so many deaths sentences in that state.”

ABC News has also posted the full transcript of the interview with Justice Stevens.  Here's an excerpt dealing with capital punishment.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You of course, became an outspoken opponent of the death penalty in your time on the court.  How did you evolve?  Can you summarize how your own views evolved?

JOHN PAUL STEVENS: About the death penalty?  Well, of course, it’s a long story, because I’ve been involved in that issue for so long.  But there also you have to keep in mind, there are always two part to the question.  One is, “When do you think it’s constitutional to have the death penalty?”  And the other question is whether one thinks it’s a wise thing to do.  And on the second question, whether your opponent is a matter of policy I’ve never felt that it was a particularly wise method of punishment.  And several of the members of the court, I can say specifically Warren Burger and Harry Blackmun, although they voted to uphold the penalty consistently early on, they personally did not think it made sense.

But my own thinking on the issue, on the constitutional issue evolved over the years, after our first decision in 1975, in the first year that I came in the court, in which at which time I thought the court was adopting procedures and rules that would confine the imposition of the death penalty into a very narrow set of cases.  And they took special pains to have fair procedures.

And over the years, the– I was disappointed to find they expanded the category of cases, rather dramatically later on, in ways that I don’t think Potter Stewart would have agreed with– who was sort of the principle author of our join opinion on– and they also have relaxed procedures in ways that actually give the prosecutor advantages in capital cases that I don’t think he has in ordinary criminal cases.  And so that seemed to me there’s a change in the general atmosphere around capital cases that occurred over the years and made me–

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: It seems like there may be another evolution now in the country that the case of Troy Davis, executed last week.  It appeared with the protests around that that the country may be heading towards a tipping point in another direction, against the death penalty.  Is that what you see?

JOHN PAUL STEVENS: I don’t know.  I’m not a very good judge of public reaction on something like that.  But I think there always has been a significant group that felt that the penalty really wasn’t worth it and caused more harm than good.

And:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Which case are you most proud of in your career?

JOHN PAUL STEVENS: You know, I’ve been asked that question a lot and I should be ready for– with an answer.  I’m– there– there are a lot of them, to tell you the truth.  And I really think that I’ve thought over a lot of cases I’ve written over the years.  And I really wouldn’t want to do any one of them over.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Not one?

JOHN PAUL STEVENS: With one exception.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Which is?

JOHN PAUL STEVENS: My vote in the Texas death case.  And I think I do mention that in that case.  I think that I came out wrong on that.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: And one of the things we’ve seen in Texas is a proliferation–

JOHN PAUL STEVENS: Right.

(OVERTALK)

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: –of executions.

JOHN PAUL STEVENS: And I think that my law clerk at the time sort of foresaw that that was a problem that was inherent in the way that statute was drafted.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: I don’t know if you saw it, but there was actually a moment in the last couple of weeks, in one of the presidential debates, where the number of executions in Texas was cited, and the crowd cheered.

JOHN PAUL STEVENS: I noticed that, yeah.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: What did you think?

JOHN PAUL STEVENS: I was– I was rather disappointed, because it– maybe one believes, and certainly a lot of people sincerely do, that it is an effective deterrent to crime and will in the long run will do more harm than good.  I don’t happen to share that view.  But there are obvious people who do.  And, of course, being hard on crime has been– always– is politically popular, let’s put it that way.

More on on Jurek v. Texas, 428 U.S. 262 (1976):, via Oyez.

Justice Stevens' book, Five Chiefs: A Supreme Court Memoir, is now available.  It's published by Little, Brown and Company.

Washington, D.C.'s great independent book seller Politics & Prose will host an author event with Justice Stevens on Nov 7, 2011.  I'll post news of additional author events.

Late last year, Justice Stevens wrote, "On the Death Sentence," for the New York Review of Books.  The essay is noted here.and  commentary on his essay begins at the link.

Justice Ginsburg Discusses Death Penalty at UC-Hastings

"Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Death Penalty, Gender Equality and That Elephant Ride With Scalia," is by Ariane de Vogue for ABC News.  Here's an extended excerpt:

The typical 78-year-old woman who found herself having to slide down an emergency chute of an aircraft might decide to cancel her trip and head home to a hot bath.

But two-time cancer survivor Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is not your typical woman.

After the pilot ordered the evacuation of Ginsburg’s plane before takeoff last week in Washington, D.C., she continued on a different plane to San Francisco. She had been invited to  give a wide-ranging talk on the intricacies of constitutional law.

At  the University of California Hastings College of Law, Professor Joan C. Williams sat down with  Ginsburg Thursday and touched on issues ranging from the constitutionality of the death penalty, gender equality and her ride on an elephant with conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.

Asked about the death penalty, Ginsburg told the audience that earlier in the evening she had been getting calls from the court because of an emergency application filed by death-row inmate Duane Buck.

“There was an execution scheduled for 7 o’clock in Texas,” she said. “It has been stayed.”

Ginsburg said dealing with such applications “is the hardest part of the job I do.”

But she went on to explain why she hadn’t taken a position that the death penalty is unconstitutional in every circumstance. It is a position taken by some former members of the Supreme Court bench.

She did not take such a stance, she explained, in order to be able to have a voice at the table when death penalty disputes come up. Had she taken the position similar to former Justice William J. Brennan or Justice Thurgood Marshall, she said, “I would have no voice in what is going on. I would not be able to make things perhaps a little bit better. ”

Death penalty decisions, she said, are a “dreadful part of the business.”

Asked by the moderator if she had one thing she’d like to accomplish before leaving the bench, she said, “I probably would go back to the day when the Supreme Court said that the death penalty cannot be administered with an even hand,” noting that such an opportunity is unlikely to arrive.

Ginsburg was referring to a 1972 decision that invalidated capital punishment laws and led to a temporary moratorium on the death penalty. The court voted to reinstate the death penalty in 1976.

The AP filing is, "San Francisco Speech: Supreme Court Justice Talks Death Penalty, Gay Rights At U.C. Hastings," by Paul Elias.  It's via Huffington Post.

The court's oldest justice spent most of the night at the University of California, San Francisco's Hastings School of Law discussing her gender equality cases when she was a lawyer, as well as important cases and legal issues that came before her on the high court.

With prompting from Hastings professor Joan Williams, Ginsburg said she found the death penalty "the hardest part of the job."

Ginsburg said, if given her druthers, she would "go back to the day to when the Supreme Court said the death penalty can't be applied with an even hand."

Nonetheless, she said she stays engaged with death penalty cases – rather than automatically voting against the death penalty as her former colleague Justice John Paul Stevens did – so she can "a voice in what's going on."

Ginsburg was appointed to the federal appeals court in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter and the Supreme Court by President Bill Clinton in 1993.

She said that even though the court often divides 5-4 on high-profile legal questions before it, she and her colleagues enjoy a collegial relationship. Ginsburg said she even travels the world with her philosophical opposite, Justice Antonin Scalia.

"Scalia is my biggest buddy at the opera," she said.

Related posts are in the Supreme Court index.