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Kill the Death Penalty

Equal Justice Initiative Wins Release of Anthony Ray Hinton

30 years on death row. Three experts testified in 2002 that the bullets from the crime scene could not be matched to the gun taken from his mother's home (which was used as evidence to convict.)

EJI, which took over the appellate work on Hinton's case in 1998, was "frustrated" by the unwillingness of the Alabama Attorney General's Office for more than a decade to acknowledge mistakes were made and to have the bullets re-tested, Stevenson said. Defense experts had testified in 2002 that they didn't see a match between the bullets or gun. Hinton also passed a polygraph test which was ruled inadmissible at trial.

State prosecutors never questioned or disputed those defense experts, Stevenson said. "They just ignored it and I think that's even more troubling," he said.
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Former Alabama Death Row inmate Anthony Ray Hinton to be freed after new testing on bullets
 
No chance it gets reversed from what I was hearing. Apparently his law team was a grade A defense team and didn't leave much room for an appeal. But I am no lawyer.
 
SkinsNDeacs said:
No chance it gets reversed from what I was hearing. Apparently his law team was a grade A defense team and didn't leave much room for an appeal. But I am no lawyer.
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His lawyer has an interesting Wikipedia page. She is from Asheville and has defended the Unabomber, Eric Rudolph, the 20th hijacker, Susan Smith and Jared Lee-Loughner. All five were spared the death penalty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judy_Clarke
 
Conservative Support Aids Bid in Nebraska to Ban Death Penalty

Apparently the Legislature voted today to repeal the death penalty, with enough votes to override a veto.

“I’m a conservative guy — I’ve been a Republican my whole life,” he said in an interview. “A lot of my conservative colleagues have come to the conclusion that we’re there to root out inefficient government programs. Some people see this as a pro-life issue. Other people see it as a good-government issue. But the support that this bill is getting from conservative members is evidence that you can get justice through eliminating the death penalty, and you can get efficient government through eliminating the death penalty.”
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Death penalty officially dead in Nebraska: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/us/nebraska-abolishes-death-penalty.html?_r=1

Mr. Ricketts, who fought against the repeal bill by appearing repeatedly in television interviews and urging Nebraskans to pressure their senators to oppose it, immediately denounced the vote.
“My words cannot express how appalled I am that we have lost a critical tool to protect law enforcement and Nebraska families,” he said in a statement. “While the Legislature has lost touch with the citizens of Nebraska, I will continue to stand with Nebraskans and law enforcement on this important issue.”
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Texas just executed a man about whom there were doubts of his guilt.

article from before his execution:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/06/01/lesterbowertodie/

It has been just more than 31 years since Bower was sent to Texas’s death row. In that time he’s seen lots of changes. Death row used to be far less oppressive: there were barred cells when he first arrived, interaction with inmates, even work assignments. After a group of six inmates plotted to escape the facility, the state in 1999 moved death row to a more secure facility where inmates are housed individually behind solid-door cells, 23 hours a day.
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Revenge Killing: Race and the death penalty in a Louisiana parish

Since 2011, Dale Cox, a jowly sixty-seven-year-old man with thinning white hair, has been responsible for more than a third of the death sentences in Louisiana. When I met him at his office, which overlooks the courthouse, I asked him if he worried about the possibility that the parish’s fraught racial history and its approach to capital punishment were related, but he said that he didn’t see the connection. “People have played the race card in this country for so long, and at some point we really need to stop and say, ‘O.K., that was a long, long, long time ago. It’s different now.’ ” He said, “Yeah, a lot of terrible things have happened in the world everywhere. And in some places it gets better, like here. And in some places it doesn’t, like Africa or Kosovo.” He told me, “I don’t get this discrimination business, I really don’t.”
…

Last March, a former colleague of Cox’s published a letter in the Shreveport Times apologizing for causing an innocent black man to spend thirty years on death row. “We are simply incapable of devising a system that can fairly and impartially impose a sentence of death,” he wrote. When a journalist with the paper, Maya Lau, asked Cox for his response, he said that he thought courts should be imposing the death penalty more, not less. “I think we need to kill more people,” he told her. “We’re not considered a society anymore—we’re a jungle.”

Cox does not believe that the death penalty works as a deterrent, but he says that it is justified as revenge. He told me that revenge was a revitalizing force that “brings to us a visceral satisfaction.” He felt that the public’s aversion to the notion had to do with the word itself. “It’s a hard word—it’s like the word ‘hate,’ the word ‘despot,’ the word ‘blood.’ ” He said, “Over time, I have come to the position that revenge is important for society as a whole. We have certain rules that you are expected to abide by, and when you don’t abide by them you have forfeited your right to live among us.”
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The week before Crawford’s trial, in November, 2013, Gold asked Cox to dismiss the case. He had just received a report from his medical expert, Daniel Spitz, a forensic pathologist from Michigan, who co-authored a pathology textbook that is widely used in medical schools. Spitz found that Roderius’s blood had tested positive for sepsis, and he concluded that he had died of pneumonia. Spitz told me that after reviewing the case he thought that there “wasn’t enough evidence to even put this before a jury. You didn’t have anybody who thought this guy committed murder except for one pathologist who decided that it was homicide on what seemed like a whim.”
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Traylor said that his finding of suffocation was based entirely on the bruises on Roderius’s lips, but he never sampled the tissue to date the injury, a basic test that would have revealed whether the bruises came from the earlier fall in the bathroom, an explanation that he ignored. He misstated medical science, telling the jury that Roderius’s brain had swelled as a result of suffocation. Swelling does not occur in cases of smothering, because the person dies rapidly, and the brain can’t swell if blood has stopped circulating. The brain can swell, though, in cases of pneumonia with sepsis.
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Apologies for the long post, but there's a lot in there.
 
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MONTEZ SPRADLEY RELEASED FROM PRISON AFTER YEARS SPENT WRONGLY ON ALABAMA'S DEATH ROW

No physical evidence tied Mr. Spradley to the 2004 murder of a 58-year-old white woman in Birmingham. The prosecution relied on the inconsistent testimony of his ex-girlfriend and on jailhouse snitch to obtain a capital murder conviction. His jury voted to impose a life sentence, but the trial judge overrode the jury's verdict and sentenced him to death.

In 2011, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals recognized that Mr. Spradley's first trial had been a "miscarriage of justice."

After that decision, Mr. Spradley's lawyers at the ACLU Capital Punishment Project found evidence that his ex-girlfriend was paid $10,000 for her testimony that Mr. Spradley had confessed to her. They learned that, before trial, she told the police that the confession had never happened, but they used the $10,000 payment and the threat that they would take away her children and prosecute her for perjury to force her to testify.

The police and prosecutors did not disclose the payment to the defense, and neither did the trial judge, who approved a payment to the witness before sentencing Mr. Spradley to death. The lead detective who authorized the payment lied on the stand about the ex-girlfriend's statement to him, and was later honored with an award from a victims' rights group for his role in this case.
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Holy shit.
 
That is an interesting question. It seems many attorneys sole purpose is to "win" the case and forget the truth. I fail to understand how his supports the concept of justice. A defense attorney should represent his client to the best of his abilities, but should this also include allowing someone who the attorney knows to be guilty to just ignore this fact and have the client "walk free" on a charge the they committed? Similarly, a prosecuting attorney who "makes up facts" through deception to have an innocent person declared guilty is even more egregious. Our judicial system needs an overhaul on how people are represented and prosecuted. The people knowingly involved in subverting justice should be disbarred or placed on trial themselves. However, defense attorneys who also attempt to circumvent justice also should face the same consequences. As it stands, our judicial system seems to be based upon deception and trickery. What a sad state of affairs. It is interesting how we seem to focus on prosecutorial injustice (which is terrible) and never mention or even seem to be bothered by defensive attorney falsehoods.
 
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Most egregious actions here were the judge. Knowing the witnesses were paid by the cops, then overriding the jury to give out the death penalty. That dude is a piece of shit of the highest order
 
HowardDeanSux said:
A defense attorney should represent his client to the best of his abilities, but should this also include allowing someone who the attorney knows to be guilty to just ignore this fact and have the client "walk free" on a charge the they committed?
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Wait what?
 
My question (from an outside non attorney person) is do defense attorneys allow a client they know to be guilty to "walk free"? Does a defense attorney attempt to have a person they know to be guilty to be found not guilty? It appears this practice is done, but is it legal?
 
I mean the defense attorney can't lie to the court or knowingly permit witnesses/their client to perjure themselves, but of course defense attorneys defend people they know to be guilty. The question is whether the prosecution can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty and so the defense attorney will just try to get below that threshold to get their client off. It's their job to zealously represent their client - of course it's legal.

If attorneys can't defend someone "known" (although I think criminal attorneys would argue you never REALLY know if they're guilty) to be guilty then that person wouldn't get a defense by anyone and the legal system is predicated on both sides getting a fair trial
 
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I understand "defending" your client, but if your client tells you they committed a murder (as an example) and they are found not guilty that is a travesty. You may done yourjob, but you may have also placed our society in greater danger by allowing a known murderer to walk our streets. That is why many view our judicial system and justice as two separate things. Thank you for educating me on the burden placed upon the defensive attorney.
 
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