By JOHN SCHWARTZ
Published: September 13, 2010 in The New York Times
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Eddie Lowery lost 10 years of his life for a crime he did not commit. There was no physical evidence at his trial for rape, but one overwhelming factor put him away: he confessed.
At trial, the jury heard details that prosecutors insisted only the rapist could have known, including the fact that the rapist hit the 75-year-old victim in the head with the handle of a silver table knife he found in the house. DNA evidence would later show that another man committed the crime. But that vindication would come only years after Mr. Lowery had served his sentence and was paroled in 1991.
“I beat myself up a lot” about having confessed, Mr. Lowery said in a recent interview. “I thought I was the only dummy who did that.”
But more than 40 others have given confessions since 1976 that DNA evidence later showed were false, according to records compiled by Brandon L. Garrett, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Experts have long known that some kinds of people — including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led — are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Mr. Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by persistent interrogators.
New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that only the defendant could have committed the crime.
An article by Professor Garrett draws on trial transcripts, recorded confessions and other background materials to show how incriminating facts got into those confessions — by police introducing important facts about the case, whether intentionally or unintentionally, during the interrogation.
To defense lawyers, the new research is eye opening. “In the past, if somebody confessed, that was the end,” said Peter J. Neufeld, a founder of the Innocence Project, an organization based in Manhattan. “You couldn’t imagine going forward.”
The notion that such detailed confessions might be deemed voluntary because the defendants were not beaten or coerced suggests that courts should not simply look at whether confessions are voluntary, Mr. Neufeld said. “They should look at whether they are reliable.”
Professor Garrett said he was surprised by the complexity of the confessions he studied. “I expected, and think people intuitively think, that a false confession would look flimsy,” like someone saying simply, “I did it,” he said.
Instead, he said, “almost all of these confessions looked uncannily reliable,” rich in telling detail that almost inevitably had to come from the police. “I had known that in a couple of these cases, contamination could have occurred,” he said, using a term in police circles for introducing facts into the interrogation process. “I didn’t expect to see that almost all of them had been contaminated.”
Of the exonerated defendants in the Garrett study, 26 — more than half — were “mentally disabled,” under 18 at the time or both. Most were subjected to lengthy, high-pressure interrogations, and none had a lawyer present. Thirteen of them were taken to the crime scene.
Mr. Lowery’s case shows how contamination occurs. He had come under suspicion, he now believes, because he had been partying and ran his car into a parked car the night of the rape, generating a police report. Officers grilled him for more than seven hours, insisting from the start that he had committed the crime.
Mr. Lowery took a lie detector test to prove he was innocent, but the officers told him that he had failed it.
“I didn’t know any way out of that, except to tell them what they wanted to hear,” he recalled. “And then get a lawyer to prove my innocence.”
Proving innocence after a confession, however, is rare. Eight of the defendants in Professor Garrett’s study had actually been cleared by DNA evidence before trial, but the courts convicted them anyway.
In one such case involving Jeffrey Deskovic, who spent 16 years in prison for a murder in Poughkeepsie, prosecutors argued that the victim may have been sexually active and so the DNA evidence may have come from another liaison she had. The prosecutors asked the jury to focus on Mr. Deskovic’s highly detailed confession and convict him.
While Professor Garrett suggests that leaking facts during interrogations is sometimes unintentional, Mr. Lowery said that the contamination of his questioning was clearly intentional.
After his initial confession, he said, the interrogators went over the crime with him in detail — asking how he did it, but correcting him when he got the facts wrong. How did he get in? “I said, ‘I kicked in the front door.’ ” But the rapist had used the back door, so he admitted to having gone around to the back. “They fed me the answers,” he recalled.
Some defendants’ confessions even include mistakes fed by the police. Earl Washington Jr., a mentally impaired man who spent 18 years in prison and came within hours of being executed for a murder he did not commit, stated in his confession that the victim had worn a halter top. In fact, she had worn a sundress, but an initial police report had stated that she wore a halter top.
Steven A. Drizin, the director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, said the significance of contamination could not be understated. While errors might lead to wrongful arrest, “it’s contamination that is the primary factor in wrongful convictions,” he said. “Juries demand details from the suspect that make the confession appear to be reliable — that’s where these cases go south.”
Jim Trainum, a former policeman who now advises police departments on training officers to avoid false confessions, explained that few of them intend to contaminate an interrogation or convict the innocent.
“You become so fixated on ‘This is the right person, this is the guilty person’ that you tend to ignore everything else,” he said. The problem with false confessions, he said, is “the wrong person is still out there, and he’s able to reoffend.”
Mr. Trainum has become an advocate of videotaping entire interrogations. Requirements for recording confessions vary widely across the country. Ten states require videotaping of at least some interrogations, like those in crimes that carry the death penalty, and seven state supreme courts have required or strongly encouraged recording.
These days Mr. Lowery, 51, lives in suburban Kansas City, in a house he is renovating with some of the $7.5 million in settlement money he received, along with apologies from officials in Riley County, Kan., where he was arrested and interrogated.
He has trouble putting the past behind him. “I was embarrassed,” he said. “You run in to so many people who say, ‘I would never confess to a crime.’ ”
He does not argue with them, because he knows they did not experience what he went through. “You’ve never been in a situation so intense, and you’re naïve about your rights,” he said. “You don’t know what you’ll say to get out of that situation.”
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
NC Pastors & former DR Inmate Discuss Crime Lab Problems
Ed Chapman at an earlier press conference
Note link to Edward Chapman's larger story below this post and see several other posts on the NC Crime Lab topic for September 14 and 15th here on The Journey of Hope blogsite below:
NORTH CAROLINA:
Asheville pastors: SBI crime lab woes show need to eliminate death penalty
North Carolina's criminal justice system is so fraught with cheating that lawmakers should eliminate the death penalty to keep innocent people from being executed, local pastors and an exonerated death row inmate said Tuesday.
Speaking at a news conference in front of the Buncombe County Courthouse, participants said recent revelations about fraud in the State Bureau of Investigation crime lab only underscore an enduring problem.
"Our faith in the criminal justice system is shaken, but our resolve to make it better (is) not," said the Rev. Jim Abbott of St. Matthias' Episcopal Church. "We are deeply concerned innocent people may have been wrongly convicted."
Abbott and others cited a report issued last month concluding that the SBI crime lab omitted, overstated or falsely reported blood evidence in dozens of cases, including 3 that ended in executions.
The government-ordered inquest by 2 former FBI officials found that agents repeatedly aided prosecutors in obtaining convictions over a 16-year period, mostly by misrepresenting blood evidence and keeping critical notes from defense attorneys.
Edward Chapman, who was exonerated in 2008 after 14 years on death row and now lives in Asheville, said law enforcement mishandling of his case led to a wrongful murder conviction.
"I can tell you how innocent people get convicted," Chapman said. "Police lied and hid evidence. I am one of many men in North Carolina that has wrongly been convicted and sentenced to death."
The Rev. Joe Hoffman, pastor of First Congregational United Church of Christ, called on Gov. Bev Perdue to commute the sentence of death row inmates to life in prison.
"This system has exposed itself for what it is," Hoffman said. "Unfairness and racial injustice have been present in our system for a very long time. We do not end violence by being violent."
Jean Parks of the group Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation said her sister was murdered, but she has doubt about the guilt of the man who was convicted.
"It doesn't help us if the wrong person is put in prison," he said. "How can we be so arrogant in maintaining the ultimate punishment?"
*********************
McDowell man faces death penalty in triple murder trial----Nebo slayings took place in '08
Jury selection began this week in the trial of a McDowell County man charged with a shooting rampage that took the lives of his own daughter, his girlfriend and the woman's daughter.
Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Stephen Monroe Buckner, 52, a former youth prison guard.
The killings took place at his home on U.S. 70 in the Nebo community the morning of Jan. 18, 2008. Authorities said the shootings apparently stemmed from a decision by his girlfriend, Vicky Lowery, to move out of the house.
Buckner is charged with 1st-degree murder in the deaths of Lowery, 42, her daughter, Chelsea Gregory, 14, and his daughter, Rebecca Rose Buckner, 25. Authorities said all 3 suffered multiple gunshot wounds.
If convicted of the charges, the McDowell County Superior Court jury will be asked to decide between the death penalty and life in prison without parole.
The defendant also is charged with attempted first-degree murder in the shooting of Gina Marie Edwards, a relative of Lowery. Edwards, 21, was shot in the arm but managed to escape and call for help from a neighbor's house.
"Everybody in my house has been shot, and he is trying to shoot me," the neighbor recalled Edwards as saying.
Deputies called to the scene were met with gunfire, resulting in charges against Buckner of 6 counts of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill.
The officers returned fire and struck Buckner, who a neighbor said staggered about 20 feet into his yard and collapsed. He spent several days at Mission Hospital being treated for his wounds.
According to a search warrant, Buckner told a deputy outside his house that "everyone inside was dead." Investigators seized about 60 items from the home, including a 12-gauge shotgun and a .357-caliber Magnum handgun. They also collected bullets, bullet fragments and blood samples.
The month before the slayings, Buckner left his job with the state Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment Center in Black Mountain. It was the end of a career in public service that started in 1988 and included 9 years as a corrections officer at the Western Youth Institute in Morganton.
(source for both: Asheville Citizen-Times & also posted at Dr. Rick Halperin's Death Penalty News & Updates)
Edward Chapman, Exonerated from NC Death Row
Speaking to Library audience in Brevard, NC
(along with Alex Chapman who is an attorney and death row activist)
Photo by Connie Nash
See Meet Exonerated from North Carolina's Death Row GO here with link to fuller Edward Chapman Story GO also here
Additional North Carolina Coverage: John Grisham, Edward Chapman and Others
John Grisham, best-selling author
- photo from wncdpr.wordpress.com
“It’s so far-sighted and progressive, it’s almost a dream,” Grisham said of North Carolina’s Innocence Commission.
Be sure also to see two related posts just below for September 14, 2010 and above for September 15th.
Please click and view the CBS affiliate video news coverage of the press conference featuring NC death row exoneree Edward Chapman; MVFR member Dr. Jean Parks and NC State Representative Patsy Keever: GO here
The ACT story this morning -- here -- was highlighted by the adjacent AP story about John Grisham's talk in Winston-Salem -- here
September 15, 2010 by wncdpr Leave a Comment
“Best-selling author John Grisham lauded a commission in North Carolina that evaluates prisoners claims of innocence, and said Tuesday that it would be duplicated across the country.
Grisham, known for his courtroom thrillers, has lended his celebrity and skills as a lawyer to national efforts to re-examine convictions where doubt exists.
John Grisham
“It’s so far-sighted and progressive, it’s almost a dream,” Grisham said of North Carolina’s Innocence Commission.
The commission earlier this year held hearings that led to the release of Greg Taylor, who spent 17 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
Grisham, 55, has been involved in what he called the innocence movement ever since researching and writing a nonfiction book, “The Innocent Man,” about an Oklahoma man wrongly sentenced to death row.”
Full article here at wncdpr.wordpress.com GO here
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
NORTH CAROLINA: Press Conference on SBI Lab Findings Held in Asheville
Murder victims' family members, a North Carolina death row exoneree and a member of his defense team and People of Faith Against the Death Penalty -- among others -- commented on the findings of malfeasance at the SBI lab during a press conference in front of the Buncombe County courthouse at noon on Tuesday.
A report by two former FBI agents released last month suggests that over 200 cases are likely affected by the faulty and unscientific process at the SBI serology lab.
Glen Chapman says, "Mistakes were made in my case as far as withheld evidence, police officers fabricating evidence"
He says some of those mistakes cost him over 15 years of his life.
Chapman says, "Having all that time taken away from me, I can't get that back."
A jury found Chapman guilty of murdering 2 women in 1992 in Hickory, North Carolina. That same jury sentenced him to death. He was later exonerated and released from prison in 2008.
Now, he is one of the many who are bringing light to the errors at North Carolina’s crime lab.
Some of which, according to the FBI’s findings, cost people their life.
"2 of the death row inmates are dead. They were executed," says Chapman.
People showed up at Buncombe County Courthouse to express their concern over these findings at the SBI crime lab, but more importantly, they had a bigger message about the death penalty in North Carolina.
Asheville resident, Jean Parks says, "I'm extremely concerned that with a system riddled with so many problems that we are still maintaining the death penalty in North Carolina."
Representative Patsy Keever says, “I think the message is we've got a problem in North Carolina with SBI and we are unfairly putting people to death and obviously the people here today prefer that we not put anyone to death at all."
Representative Keever says that separating the SBI lab from law enforcement will help to prevent errors in the state crime lab.
She also says continuing the moratorium on the death penalty in North Carolina is crucial, at least until a more permanent decision on the death penalty can be made.
(source: WSPA)
A report by two former FBI agents released last month suggests that over 200 cases are likely affected by the faulty and unscientific process at the SBI serology lab.
Glen Chapman says, "Mistakes were made in my case as far as withheld evidence, police officers fabricating evidence"
He says some of those mistakes cost him over 15 years of his life.
Chapman says, "Having all that time taken away from me, I can't get that back."
A jury found Chapman guilty of murdering 2 women in 1992 in Hickory, North Carolina. That same jury sentenced him to death. He was later exonerated and released from prison in 2008.
Now, he is one of the many who are bringing light to the errors at North Carolina’s crime lab.
Some of which, according to the FBI’s findings, cost people their life.
"2 of the death row inmates are dead. They were executed," says Chapman.
People showed up at Buncombe County Courthouse to express their concern over these findings at the SBI crime lab, but more importantly, they had a bigger message about the death penalty in North Carolina.
Asheville resident, Jean Parks says, "I'm extremely concerned that with a system riddled with so many problems that we are still maintaining the death penalty in North Carolina."
Representative Patsy Keever says, “I think the message is we've got a problem in North Carolina with SBI and we are unfairly putting people to death and obviously the people here today prefer that we not put anyone to death at all."
Representative Keever says that separating the SBI lab from law enforcement will help to prevent errors in the state crime lab.
She also says continuing the moratorium on the death penalty in North Carolina is crucial, at least until a more permanent decision on the death penalty can be made.
(source: WSPA)
John Grisham Asks: Why is Teresa Lewis on Death Row?
John GrishamJohn Grisham: Teresa Lewis didn't pull the trigger. Why is she on death row?
Sunday, September 12, 2010
The Commonwealth of Virginia already has a serious relationship with its death penalty. In the past three decades, only Texas has executed more inmates. But on Sept. 23, the Old Dominion will enter new territory when it executes a female inmate for the first time in nearly a century.
To read the rest of Grisham's Op Ed and see related boxes GO here
=========================
Also Posted: September 14, 2010 at Death Penalty Information Center (summary of the above Op Ed if no time to read in full now:
Acclaimed author John Grisham recently published an op-ed in the Washington Post questioning why Teresa Lewis is facing the death penalty when both her co-defendants, two men who actually committed the killings, were given life-without-parole sentences. According to Grisham, the judge who sentenced Lewis to death mistakenly believed that she was the “mastermind” behind the killings. However, it has now been revealed that her IQ of 72 makes her borderline intellectually disabled, that she suffered from a dependent personality disorder and other addictions, and that she lacked the basic skills necessary to organize a conspiracy to commit murder for hire. Grisham wrote, “In this case, as in so many capital cases, the imposition of a death sentence had little do with fairness. Like other death sentences, it depended more upon the assignment of judge and prosecutor, the location of the crime, the quality of the defense counsel, the speed with which a co-defendant struck a deal, the quality of each side's experts and other such factors. In Virginia, the law is hardly consistent."
CLICK here for short top story entitled NEW VOICES: John Grisham Asks-- Why is Teresa Lewis on Death Row?
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For other related URLS:
Teresa's Chaplain GO here
Death Penalty Information Center File GO here
For Dr. Rick Halperin's Death Penalty News & Updates GO here
Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad: Sharing Sorrow and Healing
Robi Damelin lost her son David to a Palestinian sniper. Ali Abu Awwad lost his older brother Yousef to an Israeli soldier. But, instead of clinging to traditional ideologies and turning their pain into more violence, they've decided to understand the other side — Israeli and Palestinian — by sharing their pain and their humanity. They tell of a gathering network of survivors who share their grief, their stories of loved ones, and their ideas for lasting peace. They don't want to be right; they want to be honest. CLICK on Speaking of Faith's Public Radio Archive and website here from their February 14, 2008 Program...
The most recent program on this Radio Program just recently included Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad's story among others GO to speaking of faith dot publicradio dot org and find more on this forgiving twosome on Ode Magazine Click here and/or Click here
Also see August 23, 2010 on this site
The most recent program on this Radio Program just recently included Robi Damelin and Ali Abu Awwad's story among others GO to speaking of faith dot publicradio dot org and find more on this forgiving twosome on Ode Magazine Click here and/or Click here
Also see August 23, 2010 on this site
North Carolina State Crime Lab Under Scrutiny
GO here for the report - September 14, 2010 Listen to the Story on All Things Considered[3 min 57 sec] from WFAE In North Carolina, the state crime lab is under scrutiny after a state panel exonerated a man in February who served 17 years on a murder conviction. Now 230 more cases are suspect, including several people on death row.
Crime labs in Detroit and Houston have also had to face similar exposure and scrutiny.
Crime labs in Detroit and Houston have also had to face similar exposure and scrutiny.
"I Cannot Be Silent" By Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy plowing. Although he was raised a rich man, he did much to help alleviate poverty, illiteracy and - with his writings perhaps - the rich justified in growing richer (without pause) while the poor grew poorer? (both photos from Wikimedia)
Tolstoy by RepinDue to a Tolstoy story coming up in a marvelously engaging writers' group from another fan, I found reference to this work of Tolstoy's mentioned in a short bio in "The Portable Tolstoy". I just found this excerpt form on the internet. Some of these classic writers never die! If Tolstoy was so able to choose and to foresee what would capture a future audience's attention - may he also be able to see what he has brought to so many of us years hence and how we are still passing his writings along...Perhaps this way his rough ending may be somewhat smoothed in his "celestial memories" if there is anything akin to that? :)
Connie
nj.com
"I cannot be silent"
Published: Saturday, August 25, 2007,
Joseph G. Racioppi
Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian writer/philosopher, is famous primarily for the titanic novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. What many people don't know is that Tolstoy spent the last thirty years of his life on religious and philosophical writings. He even corresponded with a young Mohandas Gandhi who may owe his idea of passive resistance to Tolstoy.
One of the best tracts I've read against the death penalty is Tolstoy's I cannot be silent (1908) In it, Tolstoy rails against government institutions and the church for their approval of capital punishment. Almost comically he describes an execution:
...Beside them walks a long-haired man, wearing a stole and vestments of gold or silver cloth and bearing a cross. The procession stops. The man in command of the whole business says something, the secretary reads a paper; and when the paper has been read the long-haired man, addressing those whom other people are about to strangle with cords, says something about God and Christ.
Immediately after these words the hangmen (there are several, for one man could not manage so complicated a business) dissolve some soap, and, having soaped the loops in the cords that they may tighten better, seize the shackled men, put shrouds on them, lead them to a scaffold, and place the well-soaped nooses around their necks.
And then, one after another, living men are pushed off the benches which are drawn from under their feet, and by their own weight suddenly tighten the nooses round their necks and are painfully strangled. Men, alive a minute before, become corpses dangling from a rope, at first swinging slowly and then resting motionless.
All this is carefully arranged and planned by learned and enlightened people of the upper class.
Tolstoy reminds the reader that government officials involved in this process - "from the lowest hangman to the highest official - all support religion and Christianity, which is altogether incompatible with the deed they commit."
All in favor of or against capital punishment should read this piece. I found it in The Portable Tolstoy, edited by John Bayley (1978). (P. 732)
Tolstoy was anti-war, anti-Church (he was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church), and anti-capital punishment. Or to put it more positively, he was pro-nonviolence.
Although his writings are at least a century old, they are absolutely relevant today. For further reading see: The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (1908), Confession (1879), and Resurrection (1899-1900).
© 2010 NJ.com. All rights reserved.
Saturday, September 04, 2010
OHIO: Kevin Keith
Kevin Keith
This is the face of man whose life (many death penalty abolitionists & moratorium activists) helped save.
"It feels like the world has stopped...Our family has gone through a lot...I'd like to thank Governor Strickland for being a just man," said Kevin's older brother Charles upon hearing the news that his younger brother would live past September 15th--that he would live to embrace his family one more time and celebrate another birthday.
Thanks to supporters and activists like you, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland spared Kevin Keith from execution yesterday.
Strickland, who is facing a tough reelection battle and was presented with an 8-0 recommendation against clemency from the Ohio Parole Board, managed to see past political ambition and expediency and summoned the courage to do what was right. He recognized that the execution of an innocent man could not be undone. He weighed his options and cast his vote for life.
This heroic decision is a reminder that committed individuals can make a difference--that each and every one of our actions matter--that one life matters. If you feel moved to thank Governor Strickland, his contact info and a sample letter are below.
Thank you for standing with us as we work to end the death penalty. Thanks to you, the tide is turning.
Sincerely,
Stefanie Faucher
Associate Director
PS: Please consider supporting the crucial work of Death Penalty Focus. We could not do it without you.
Contact Info and Template Thank You Letter to Governor Strickland
Governor's Office
Riffe Center, 30th Floor
77 South High Street
Columbus, OH 43215-6108
Phone/Fax
General Info: (614) 466-3555
Fax: (614) 466-9354
Online: here
Dear Governor Strickland,
Thank you for granting clemency to Kevin Keith.
As you noted in your commutation statement, many legitimate questions have been raised regarding the evidence in support of Mr. Keith's conviction. This evidence of innocence was never presented in its entirety before any court or jury. It would have been a tragic mistake to execute Mr. Keith when such grave doubts linger about his guilt.
This year, you demonstrated your commitment to improving the fairness and accuracy of Ohio's criminal justice system by signing into law comprehensive reform legislation to combat wrongful convictions. By granting clemency to Mr. Keith, you upheld that commitment.
I commend you for recognizing that there is no room for error when a life is at stake.
Sincerely,
Death Pen Focus
When You Lose a Child (Compassionate Groups)
FAll Scene Vermont US here
First of all, listen to this touching telling of one couple's unthinkable story - so courageously and truthfully, eloquently spoken -- especially during this US Labor Day weekend when death by vehicle can be a kind of murder if done with too much drinking, etc. and leave scars for all...yet this also relates to parents/grandparents who lose children due to violent crime, war, floods, etc. Here's an AUDIO which just might inspire others to find or CREATE the same kind of gatherings...if not for healing exactly - for compassion and sharing of the grieving - anywhere in the world. With little if any funds needed, this is one beautiful way people can reach out to one another...
The story of grieving parents, their children and finding compassion - CLICK here
There are many ways parents lose their children. Years ago I was on a panel for a conference of bereaved parents. (Because I had written a book with my sister on the death of her daughter who was three-years old called "The Other Side of Sorrow" years ago when half the age I am now.) Next to me on the panel was a psychologist who worked in areas around the world which experienced catastrophe. She said the worst kind of grieving was parents who outlived their children - that this was an unusually hard-to-heal kind of grieving.
This "disconnect" - unnatural kind of premature bereavement - goes for parents and grand-parents who are murder victims family members who lose children to crime as well as those who lose children in war (as military or as civilians)- by violence in vehicular accidents - to neighborhoods fights or parties - or due to suicide and overdose.
This "unnatural loss" while tremendous for ALL is extra difficult for parents and grandparents who lose children in hurricanes, tornados, tsunamis or floods...
Here are various ways people who've lost children come together in prayer, empathy and sometimes to form community--even to form a kind of spiritual gathering which can't be found in many churches, synagogues, mosques, temples or other religious gatherings. There is room for many more such gatherings and connections...one on one and in larger movements..
Empathy and prayers needed for Pakistan victims of War and Floods...plz remember all the bereaved, especially parents, grandparents, spouses and children...some may call drones and those who operate murderers and do - not a good thing for either nation: here
Important Reports & Groups about losing loved ones in many contexts:
Love More to Suffer Less
As we remember to pray with and for the many bereaved parents and others from the various wars/occupations - soldiers and civilians on all sides: here
Pat Tillman's Family are Not Alone here
From one of my favorite sites on forgiveness: Singing About Revenge on Speaking of Faith blogsite here
Revenge and Forgiveness here
Bereaved Parents USA dot org here
Murder Victims Family Members for Human Rights MVFHR - great folk who practice Love more to Suffer Less! here
Murder Victims Families here
One of my favorite groups ever - what moving parents much like The Journey of Hope folk among Israelis and Palestinians with so much to teach the world!
The Parents Circle here
Last but by far not least: Be sure to see the stories on The Journey of Hope blogsite and website for other Bereaved parents who have not sought revenge.
Monday, August 30, 2010
The Truth about Homicide
(anyone know how to enlarge?)I listened to this radio program back a few months and was deeply impressed with the compassion expressed for ALL involved in this suffering. I found it just now by accident and felt that certainly we at The Journey of Hope care about many of these same issues along with the need for way more prevention...even, no ESPECIALLY in such times as ours today with the need to prioritize lessening funds for helping people.
"The truth about homicide," she says, "is that it is black men in their 20s, in their 30s, in their 40s. The way we guide money and policy in this country, we do not care about those people. It's not described as what's central to our homicide problem, and I wanted people to see that. I wanted people to see those lives and to see that that's our real homicide problem in America."The money needs to go to black male argument violence," she continues. "Anything else … you're dealing with the margins of the problem, statistically, and it's not right." For this article GO here
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Opinion: Without death penalty, we'd have funds to treat mental illness
By Deldelp Medina
Special to the Mercury News
As someone who lost a loved one to murder, elections in California cause me pain. The death penalty is trotted out like a show pony every election cycle.
The latest July 22 Field Poll is such a show pony, released as momentum builds for the California gubernatorial elections. "Seven in 10 voters favor capital punishment in California" screamed the headlines across the state. Steve Cooley's campaign for attorney general quickly took their cue, bragging that while "death sentences have declined nationwide, Cooley obtained 13 death verdicts last year, four more than the entire state of Texas."
The echo of familiar rhetoric is incredibly painful for those of us who have lost a loved one to murder, and whose voices are effectively shut out of the debate because we oppose the death penalty.
We heard of my aunt's violent murder watching the national evening news in Spanish. My family members called each other right away, from San Francisco to Colombia, the East Coast and beyond.
My Tía's killer was her own son -- my cousin. He was in the midst of a psychotic break. We never got the sympathetic call from the police we expected. Instead, we got a low blow from the district attorney. He wanted the death penalty.
We didn't have the $100,000 it would take to get a private defense attorney, so we gave what we had. Some planned the funeral. Others gave their English skills and education. I flew to Miami to advocate for him.
We pored over his school and medical records to reconstruct his painful past. When we met with his public defenders and realized how overworked they were, we gave our time. We became his investigators.
We banded together in our grief.
Finally, the obvious became clear to the DA and he dropped the death penalty charges. A judge ruled that my cousin was ill, that he was not fit to stand trial at all. He will probably live the rest of his life in a mental hospital. It sounds strange, but that was one of the best gifts I ever got.
Our story is unfortunately common. Mental illness and familial violence often overlap. And right now, California's justice system is not equipped to deal with either.
It's important for prosecutors and politicians alike to listen to the family members who understand the anguish and the dangers wrought by mental illness. Our vantage point is valuable.
And for many of us, the death penalty is not an answer. Yet we are suffocated by the loudest, angriest "tough on crime" voices. We deserve to be heard. Within the system and in the debate.
We know that there is a better choice: We can replace the death penalty with life without possibility of parole. In California, every person sentenced to life without parole has died in prison or will die in prison unless new evidence emerges to show that he or she is innocent.
Life without the possibility of parole also costs a fraction compared to the death penalty. In the next five years, California will spend $1 billion on the death penalty. Just this week, the governor took $64 million from the general fund to begin construction of a new death row housing facility that will cost $400 million to complete.
Meanwhile, the governor has proposed cutting more than $400 million a year from mental health programs at the local level. Cutting funding to treat mental illness while paying for the death penalty is simply insane.
Justice is one of those precious gifts only strangers can offer. Let's hope our elected officials will give us justice by protecting funding for mental illness programs and cutting the death penalty instead.
DELDELP MEDINA is an active member of California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and lives in Berkeley. She wrote this article for this newspaper.
Special to the Mercury News
As someone who lost a loved one to murder, elections in California cause me pain. The death penalty is trotted out like a show pony every election cycle.
The latest July 22 Field Poll is such a show pony, released as momentum builds for the California gubernatorial elections. "Seven in 10 voters favor capital punishment in California" screamed the headlines across the state. Steve Cooley's campaign for attorney general quickly took their cue, bragging that while "death sentences have declined nationwide, Cooley obtained 13 death verdicts last year, four more than the entire state of Texas."
The echo of familiar rhetoric is incredibly painful for those of us who have lost a loved one to murder, and whose voices are effectively shut out of the debate because we oppose the death penalty.
We heard of my aunt's violent murder watching the national evening news in Spanish. My family members called each other right away, from San Francisco to Colombia, the East Coast and beyond.
My Tía's killer was her own son -- my cousin. He was in the midst of a psychotic break. We never got the sympathetic call from the police we expected. Instead, we got a low blow from the district attorney. He wanted the death penalty.
We didn't have the $100,000 it would take to get a private defense attorney, so we gave what we had. Some planned the funeral. Others gave their English skills and education. I flew to Miami to advocate for him.
We pored over his school and medical records to reconstruct his painful past. When we met with his public defenders and realized how overworked they were, we gave our time. We became his investigators.
We banded together in our grief.
Finally, the obvious became clear to the DA and he dropped the death penalty charges. A judge ruled that my cousin was ill, that he was not fit to stand trial at all. He will probably live the rest of his life in a mental hospital. It sounds strange, but that was one of the best gifts I ever got.
Our story is unfortunately common. Mental illness and familial violence often overlap. And right now, California's justice system is not equipped to deal with either.
It's important for prosecutors and politicians alike to listen to the family members who understand the anguish and the dangers wrought by mental illness. Our vantage point is valuable.
And for many of us, the death penalty is not an answer. Yet we are suffocated by the loudest, angriest "tough on crime" voices. We deserve to be heard. Within the system and in the debate.
We know that there is a better choice: We can replace the death penalty with life without possibility of parole. In California, every person sentenced to life without parole has died in prison or will die in prison unless new evidence emerges to show that he or she is innocent.
Life without the possibility of parole also costs a fraction compared to the death penalty. In the next five years, California will spend $1 billion on the death penalty. Just this week, the governor took $64 million from the general fund to begin construction of a new death row housing facility that will cost $400 million to complete.
Meanwhile, the governor has proposed cutting more than $400 million a year from mental health programs at the local level. Cutting funding to treat mental illness while paying for the death penalty is simply insane.
Justice is one of those precious gifts only strangers can offer. Let's hope our elected officials will give us justice by protecting funding for mental illness programs and cutting the death penalty instead.
DELDELP MEDINA is an active member of California Crime Victims for Alternatives to the Death Penalty and lives in Berkeley. She wrote this article for this newspaper.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Capital punishment can't bring back loved ones
Megan Smith, Asheville • August 21, 2010 (from a family member of murder victims)
There is a lot of current hype about the death penalty and the Racial Justice Act. I lost my father and stepmother to murder, and one of the killers is on death row now. As I have learned more and more about capital punishment over the years, it has become clear that the system is biased and broken in many ways. It seems like a system so extreme ought to at least be fair — racially and otherwise — but isn't. I'm glad that the Racial Justice Act forces us to confront that issue. Even if some are stretching the statistics, overall the numbers speak loudly that something must change.
As a family member of murder victims, I can tell you that I feel no healing, justice or closure that someone else might die. It doesn't set things straight again, prevent other teenagers from going down the wrong track, nor does it bring back my loved ones. Maybe instead of just analyzing racial statistics, perhaps we can take another look at the purpose of the death penalty and if it is really accomplishing what we hope it is.
Asheville Citizen-Times here
SEE and ADD COMMENTS online at Asheville Citizen-Times here and below at The Journey of Hope blog here...
There is a lot of current hype about the death penalty and the Racial Justice Act. I lost my father and stepmother to murder, and one of the killers is on death row now. As I have learned more and more about capital punishment over the years, it has become clear that the system is biased and broken in many ways. It seems like a system so extreme ought to at least be fair — racially and otherwise — but isn't. I'm glad that the Racial Justice Act forces us to confront that issue. Even if some are stretching the statistics, overall the numbers speak loudly that something must change.
As a family member of murder victims, I can tell you that I feel no healing, justice or closure that someone else might die. It doesn't set things straight again, prevent other teenagers from going down the wrong track, nor does it bring back my loved ones. Maybe instead of just analyzing racial statistics, perhaps we can take another look at the purpose of the death penalty and if it is really accomplishing what we hope it is.
Asheville Citizen-Times here
SEE and ADD COMMENTS online at Asheville Citizen-Times here and below at The Journey of Hope blog here...
Saturday, August 21, 2010
Love and Compassion for All of Humanity needed for Flood Victims
Sindh is now being described as the worst-hit province
Evacuwees Peshawar area Pakistan Floods 2010 SHORT Videos From Cecos Peshawar University CLICK HERE Amazing photos tell all...
Please donate to Edhi Foundation (a highly-respected organization around the world. Beloved, saintly Edhi says his religion is "ALL OF HUMANITY"):
Edhi Foundation dot com Websitge here
This group does not do Credit Cards (at least out of New York).For US readers, please send your check to:
USA Edhi international Foundation
42-07 National StreetCorona, New York, 11368 USA
Tel: (718) 639-5120
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See the many awards the Edhi Foundation has earned - CLICK HERE
Pulitzer-Prize Winning Poet Underlines Needs of Murder Victims
Photo: Courtesy of the author/Natasha Trethewey and her brother Joe stand in front of Fort Massachusetts on Ship Island, Miss., circa 1999.
The daughter of an African-American mother and a white father, Natasha Trethewey often explores in her poetry her experiences growing up in Mississippi and Georgia
While not a "usual" Journey post, I was quite moved listening to this evocative poet speak about the special emotions and needs of those who suffer after murder of a loved one (both about her own experience and that of her step-brother - as they both lost the same mother in this horrific way - due to murder by their mutual father - Natasha's step-father). In such a compelling way, Natasha speaks of the great need and benefit to TELL and/or WRITE about the suffering - the guilt - the loss and the need to care for others who also lost this loved one/and or their own life as it was before the murder. And also the value of letter-writing - not just talking on the telephone or visiting with the prisoner.
Although some of this is about the book soon to be available on getting through the Katrina hurricanes, the part about the murder and how she and her step-brother stood by each other is quite fitting and certainly could be a "life-saver" for many if not most of us in "JOURNEY" concerning our own stories, the people we know in prison and the wounded loved ones in our lives.
Interview with Terry Groos, NPR dot org originally aired August 18, 2010 with repeat airing August 21, 2010
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey grew up in Gulfport, Miss., a coastal area that suffered some of the heaviest damage from Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Though Natasha Trethewey no longer lives in Mississippi, much of her mother's extended family, including her younger brother, live along the Gulf Coast and have been struggling after the storm to recover what they lost (in more ways than one as these losses bring up more vividly OTHER LOSSES - such as the loss of mother to murder.)
On finding out her brother had been arrested
"It happened in the spring of 2007, but he didn't tell me about it then. He didn't tell me about it because that was the moment when happy things were going on in my life and he didn't want to ruin that. ... He didn't tell me until a year later when he was about to go to trial, and his lawyer told him that if he didn't call me and ask me to come down there and to speak on his behalf, then he might be in jail a very long time. I didn't let him know that I was upset [but when] I flew back the next day, and my husband picked me up at the airport ... I just started sobbing. And I asked him how I was going to live if my heart was in prison."
"I think I do feel a good measure of guilt. I've carried with me a lot of survivor's guilt ... and with my brother, I definitely feel that. You can come from the same household and yet have such dramatically different lives. ... I feel guilty that I couldn't protect him from it. When [our mother] died, because I was 7 years older than him, my brother began to look to me as kind of a surrogate mother. I was the one that he clung to in that way. And yet, I couldn't mother him in the way I wish I could have. When he was in prison, I think that was really so difficult."
On communicating with her brother while he was in prison
"One of my failures during that time was the kind of responses that I gave to him. My brother was writing to me, he would call and I would never miss a phone call. I'd do everything I could do be there, if he needed anything, I'd send it. Along with his girlfriend, I worked tirelessly calling and e-mailing the commissioner of prisons in Mississippi to get my brother released, to have him moved to the facility we wanted him to be in so he could be closer to family — all of that kind of legwork, I was willing to do. But what I never once did was write him a letter. Once it hit me, it felt like the worst betrayal ever. One of the first things I did when he was out was sit him down and apologize for it. Not once when he was there did he ask me to, and I know how that probably hurt him deeply, and I don't know why it didn't occur to me. It didn't occur to me at all."
Here's from another site about the lost mother:
I was jogging in the graveyard near my house one day, and there’s an old part where a lot of Confederate soldiers are buried. I’m one of those people who can’t not read every tombstone -- they scream at me for their names to be heard. I was thinking about that when I came home and planned to write about that. When I sat down to write “Graveyard Blues,” what I recalled was burying my mother. That was when I came to understand what was going on in my subconscious. I wrote the poem “Graveyard Blues,” and the final couplet has an image of me laying my head down on her stone. When I finished the poem, I thought the couplet made sense for what the poem was trying to get at.
from “Graveyard Blues”:
It rained the whole time we were laying her down;
Rained from church to grave when we put her down.
The suck of mud at our feet was a hollow sound
. . . .
The road going home was pocked with holes,
That home-going road is always full of holes;
Though we slow down, time’s wheel still rolls.
I wander now among names of the dead:
My mother’s name, stone pillow for my head.
That image is real because my mother does not have any kind of stone on her grave. That sort of hit me, the history that had not been properly memorialized, remembered, tended by someone native to her -- it was my mother’s history. She was just like those black soldiers. No monument existed, and in that way she was erased from the landscape...
Trethewey, in a new memoir, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, explains that both the identity and future are linked to how one remembers both place and people.
She says she continues to find comfort in her poems: "I think poetry's always a kind of faith. It is the kind that I have," Trethewey says. "It is what can offer solace and meaning but also ... allows me to understand these events."
Trethewey holds the Phillis Wheatley Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Emory University. She received the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her collection Native Guard.
A small portion of the last part excerpted from Beyond Katrina by Natasha Trethewey. Copyright 2010 by Natasha Trethewey. Excerpted by permission of the University of Georgia Press. All rights reserved.
Read and Hear more here
OR
here
Thursday, August 19, 2010
Join us on the Journey: Short Message from Bill
"The Journey of Hope…from Violence to Healing" was created as a response to helping end the death penalty. That is why "The Journey" was created and "The Journey" will stay that way until the death penalty is abolished World-Wide.
The most important ingredient of the Journey of Hope is “love and compassion” for all of humanity. If you have love and compassion for all of humanity you will not want to see anybody put into the death chamber and their life taken from them.
"The Journey" also promotes forgiveness as a wonderful way to healing. And the Journey highly endorses restorative justice as a way of life.
Led by murder victim family members, we are joined by death row family members, death row exonerees, families of the executed and other activists who march with the Journey Banner.
Come join us on "The Journey". We need your help to carry the Banner.
Peace,
Bill
The most important ingredient of the Journey of Hope is “love and compassion” for all of humanity. If you have love and compassion for all of humanity you will not want to see anybody put into the death chamber and their life taken from them.
"The Journey" also promotes forgiveness as a wonderful way to healing. And the Journey highly endorses restorative justice as a way of life.
Led by murder victim family members, we are joined by death row family members, death row exonerees, families of the executed and other activists who march with the Journey Banner.
Come join us on "The Journey". We need your help to carry the Banner.
Peace,
Bill
Sunday, August 15, 2010
And Justice For All
Sister Helen Prejean On Why The Death Penalty Is Wrong
by David Cook published in The Sun Magazine
by David Cook published in The Sun Magazine
In 1608, on the shores of Britain’s newly formed Virginia Colony, Captain George Kendall was found guilty of spying for Spain and sentenced to death by firing squad. His execution — the first recorded in the colonial New World — began a policy of death-penalty sentencing that continues to this day in the United States, where 3,300 men and women sit on death row. Since 1977 more than 1,200 people have been executed, with the overwhelming majority of those executions taking place in Southern states. One of those killed was Elmo Patrick Sonnier, convicted by a Louisiana jury of murdering David LeBlanc and Loretta Ann Bourque on the night of their high-school homecoming. While on death row Sonnier began corresponding with a Catholic nun in New Orleans named Sister Helen Prejean. Their correspondence, Prejean says, turned her life upside down. Today she is one of the world’s foremost death-penalty abolitionists.
Prejean was born into a life of Louisiana privilege and entered the convent intent on seclusion. It wasn’t until a fellow nun asked, “What are you doing to stop the suffering in the world?” that Prejean decided to leave the cloister and help the urban poor. After moving into a housing project in New Orleans, Prejean became Sonnier’s spiritual advisor. She visited with him in person, right up to the last hours of his life. Sonnier was electrocuted before her eyes, and his story led her to write the Pulitzer Prize–nominated book Dead Man Walking (Vintage), which became an Oscar-winning film starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon.
Prejean has since served as spiritual advisor to five more death-row inmates and travels the world to speak in opposition to the death penalty. Her second book is titled The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions (Vintage), and she is at work on her spiritual autobiography, River of Fire. She also assists families of murder victims in New Orleans through Survive, a victims’ advocacy group that she founded. Prejean, who is seventy-one, has received numerous honorary doctorates and been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. She says she is encouraged by recent trends toward abolishing capital punishment: in the last three decades six U.S. states have suspended or abolished use of the death penalty, and 139 death-row prisoners have been exonerated since 1973.
I met Prejean at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she spoke — with her distinct Louisiana style — to overflow crowds. A cold rain fell outside afterward as she and I sat down to talk. Long accustomed to fighting for justice, Prejean carries herself with a presence that is both firm and tender. When she walks into a room, the atmosphere changes immediately.
Like the best teachers, Prejean knows the path to the heart is through story, and she peppers her talks with moving accounts of those she has encountered in our nation’s prisons. Earlier she’d told the story of Dobie Gillis Williams, who was executed in 1999 by lethal injection. Prejean was with him in his last hours. He had an iq of 65. His last words were: “I just want to say I got no hard feelings for anybody. God bless everybody, God bless.” Prejean believes he was innocent.
Cook: According to Amnesty International, 93 percent of the world’s executions take place in five countries: China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, and the U.S. Why is our government — supposedly a beacon of democracy to the world — on such a list?
Prejean: The death penalty is a natural outgrowth of our long history of using violence to achieve our ends. We’re a very young country, and violence has worked for us in the past. It began with the settling of this continent and the genocide against Native Americans, then continued when we brought slaves over. Now we tend to blame the poor and see them as a criminal element and use coercion and violence to control them.
Cook: But capital punishment has been practiced for centuries. Is it part of human nature?
Prejean: It’s part of a cultural understanding that says the only way to subdue evil is with violence, but it’s not part of human nature. Look at all the countries in the world that don’t have the death penalty. The very first act of the new Constitutional Court in South Africa, after it got rid of apartheid, was to banish the death penalty. To some extent violence is part of our nature, but compassion is too. Seeking justice for everybody is also part of human nature.
The death penalty is the most important civil-rights issue of our time. It’s a deeply symbolic issue, because it says that the way we’re going to solve problems is by violence. It says that some among us are such a danger to who we are and what we stand for that they must be eliminated. To arrive at this mind-set, human beings have to flip a switch inside themselves. Deep down we know we are brothers and sisters and are all connected. For the death penalty to exist, we have to throw some switch that says, “The Other is not human like us,” and so we can do whatever we want to them. And of course the execution must be removed from the public eye. The chamber is behind prison walls, and we don’t hear about what goes on inside it.
Cook: If we went to death row, who would we find there?
Prejean: Less than 1 percent of the roughly fifteen thousand people who commit homicide each year are selected for death. Ninety percent of the prisoners who do end up on death row were abused as children. Nearly 100 percent are poor. We haven’t tried hard enough to solve the problem of poverty in this country. We have mentally ill people on death row. The Supreme Court has said that it’s unconstitutional to execute an insane person. So what do the states do? They give legally insane prisoners medication to make them appear sane enough to stand trial. We have some people on death row who don’t know how to read and write. But you also meet people on death row who read books and write profound reflections. Some of them will try to teach their fellow death-row prisoners how to read and write.
I used to think that people on death row would support and love each other, since they’re all in the same boat, but you also see people get into fights over tobacco or coffee and sometimes even throw their feces at someone walking by. There is fierceness and cruelty side by side with kindness.
Cook: You are currently the spiritual advisor to two people on death row.
Prejean: Yes. Manuel Ortiz has been on death row for seventeen years. He’s from El Salvador and was convicted of killing his wife for insurance money, solely on the word of a man named Carlos Saavedra. Saavedra said Manuel had hired him to kill his wife, but there is no evidence that Manuel even knew him. I can’t say too much about his case because his lawyers are in the process of appealing the decision.
Normally I serve only one prisoner at a time, but Cathy Henderson wrote me a letter and asked me to be with her. She is on death row in Texas and is accused of murdering a baby she was sitting. She has always said it was an accident. Her lawyers gave virtually no defense. Prosecutors called her a “baby murderer” and said she deliberately killed the infant. Cathy said she was playing the airplane game so many parents play — swinging him around — and her bare foot landed on something sharp. The baby dropped from her hands, and his head hit the floor. The medical examiner at her trial told the jury it could not have been an accident, but her new pro-bono lawyers have gotten four biomechanical experts to look at the physics of what happened, and all four came to the conclusion that it could have been an accident. The medical examiner has reviewed their findings and signed an affidavit saying that, if he’d had this information then, he would have changed his testimony. The Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas, which almost always rubber-stamps death-penalty convictions, has said there must be a new hearing. So there is the possibility she will escape the death penalty and perhaps be set free.
Cook: You’ve said that death row dehumanizes people. How?
Prejean: Every day on death row you receive indications that you are disposable: the way the guards treat you, the way you’re talked to, the way the courts treat you. No one gives any indication that you are a human being with dignity. That is why I’m there: to say to death-row prisoners that they are human.
On death row they lock you up and count you four times a day and treat you like chattel. In the maximum-security units there is very little human contact, so the people there are virtually in solitary confinement. It is torture. I believe that we tilled the soil for the torture in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib with how we treat death-row prisoners in the U.S. We have become insensitive to their pain and humanity. Prisons are like fiefdoms, and a warden is like a king who has absolute power.
Cook: In the U.S. we have almost 5 percent of the world’s population and almost 25 percent of the global prison population.
Prejean: Yes, we incarcerate more people than any other country in the world. Prison is an industry from which certain people benefit: Politicians benefit because they get elected by claiming they are tough on crime. Businesses make money off prisons. That keeps the system going. Two-thirds of the people in prison are there for nonviolent crimes, like bad checks or drug possession. Why do we use such excessive punishment? What does it mean for us to take a woman who writes bad checks and separate her from her family for five or eight or ten years? What is the effect of that? Is that what she deserves?
As a society we have to examine our belief that severe punishment is the way to restore order. The main objective of prisons is to keep society safe, not to cause prisoners pain simply because they caused others pain. People who have committed violent crimes need to be imprisoned to keep the public safe, but we must also strive for rehabilitation. We know that prisoners who get an education tend not to reoffend, but we’ve cut most educational programs from prisons — really, any program that might restore humanity to the prisoners. Restorative justice would improve our society instead of simply throwing people away.
Cook: What would “restorative justice” look like?
Prejean: I once visited a women’s prison in Dublin, Ireland, and had I not known it was a prison, I would have never recognized it as such. The prison provided counseling to help the women understand what had led them to commit a crime. It provided a place for their children to come visit them. And it gave them an education and work supervision and lessons on developing relationships. In the U.S. we would call that “coddling criminals.” There they saw it as taking seriously the prisoners’ needs.
We picture all people in prison as terrible criminals. We picture murderers as people who love to kill, but most who commit murder do so in the heat of the moment and without thought of consequences. The only way to change our impressions is to go into prison and meet the people there.
Cook: Are there rehabilitation programs in the U.S. similar to the one you saw in Ireland?
Prejean: John Sage runs Bridges to Life in Texas. His sister Marilyn was brutally murdered, and he took the pain of her loss and directed it toward helping people in prison. He works with prisoners who are going to be released and teaches them job skills. He also helps them take responsibility for their crimes. They have to meet a victim’s family — not the family of their victim but one that suffered a similar loss. The family helps the prisoner understand the pain he has caused.
Cook: If someone is guilty of terrifying violence, what should his or her punishment look like?
Prejean: I can tell you what it should not look like. Any kind of punishment that degrades a defenseless human being and takes away his or her dignity is immoral. That is the basis for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Conventions. No one should be subjected to cruel punishment or torture.
Cook: African Americans represent approximately 15 percent of our population and 50 percent of our prison population. Theologian James Cone has claimed that African Americans are being lynched once again by our prison system. Is he right?
Prejean: It is legal lynching, absolutely. When you look at Louisiana State Penitentiary, over 70 percent of the inmates are African Americans. You see them going out to the fields with hoes over their shoulders, followed by guards on horseback with guns. Basically a young man sentenced to life there will spend his days working on a farm for four cents an hour. The most you can get, after twenty years, is twenty-one cents an hour.
Cook: In your years of public speaking, what arguments have you most often encountered in favor of the death penalty?
Prejean: The most common argument is that death is a just punishment for those who have taken the lives of innocents. The murderer did not respect the life of the victim and therefore deserves what he or she gets. Anything less would devalue the victim’s life.
Cook: Former New York mayor Ed Koch once said, “It is by exacting the highest penalty for the taking of human life that we affirm the highest value of human life.”
Prejean: I’ve heard district attorneys say something like “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, we are going to ask you for the death penalty, because that is the only way to show how much we respect the innocent life that’s been taken.” Most people who make those kinds of rhetorical statements have never been there in the final hours and watched what it means to take people who are alive and strap them down to a gurney or in a chair and kill them. They are removed from the results of their actions.
I also hear religious arguments. Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia has said that Christians should support the death penalty because we expect to be punished for our sins. He believes that part of Christianity is to suffer pain and pay atonement. Scalia has also called execution by lethal injection “a quiet death” and “enviable” compared to how the victim died. A Supreme Court justice shouldn’t use those words to talk about torture and killing. Human beings have imaginations, and the condemned die a thousand times in their minds before they are executed.
Some people approve of the death penalty because they think it is cheaper than life imprisonment. Actually the death penalty is more expensive. That’s why more and more states with budget crises are doing away with it. A capital-murder case, as one prosecutor says, is the Cadillac of the criminal-justice system. It takes multiple trials, requires airtight evidence, and uses more expert witnesses than any other type of case. Then you have to build a special section of the prison and hire personnel to staff it. Often death-row prisoners are not allowed to work to defray the cost of their board and keep. In California it costs millions of dollars a year to house more than seven hundred people on death row.
In response to these arguments, I share stories about people I know. When New Jersey did away with the death penalty, sixty-two murder victims’ families testified that the death-penalty process had only prolonged their agony. They had been told it would provide “closure,” but in reality it meant they had to witness the death of another person, often after waiting ten or fifteen years to do so, and this death would do nothing to bring back their loved ones. During the waiting process, their story is in and out of the spotlight. It makes their wound public, and the healing doesn’t come. Many murder victims’ families have been prominent in the abolition movement.
I also point out that the death penalty is not reserved for the most terrible murders. It’s more common in cases where the victim is white, for example: approximately 80 percent of death-penalty cases involve the murder of a white person, yet 50 percent of all homicide victims are people of color.
Whether the death penalty is sought comes down to the decision of the prosecutor. Thankfully juries have to be told now that they can sentence someone to life without parole even when the prosecutor is seeking the death penalty. In the past juries were not given that information. They thought the death penalty or freedom were the only options. Even in Texas death-penalty sentences have diminished because of this. Juries — which are made up of ordinary citizens entrusted with godlike power — have a terrible responsibility.
Cook: What an enormous — and perhaps unethical — burden for ordinary citizens to carry.
Prejean: Yes, we put twelve people behind closed doors for hours or days and let them decide whether a person lives or dies. They don’t have the tools to do that. They don’t know what evidence may have been hidden from them in the trial. Even if they know for sure that this person is guilty of the crime, do they get to look at mitigating circumstances? Parents of the victim ask the jurors to “please kill this bastard who killed my boy”; parents of the accused beg the jurors not to kill their son. What’s a human being to do with that?
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Marietta Update
I talked with Marietta yesterday. She was doing some yard work. She can't just stay sitting. She will need surgery again on her leg to have better blood pressure. When she walks for a couple of blocks she gets cramps in her leg and she has to stop.
She is a warrior. She told me that I had half of the world praying for her. I told her then my job was only half done. Open-mouthed smile emoticon
She is not sure when she will have the surgery but she thinks it will be soon and she will be healthy for the Texas Journey of Hope in October.
Please keep praying for her. We all need her healthy.
Peace,
Bill
She is a warrior. She told me that I had half of the world praying for her. I told her then my job was only half done. Open-mouthed smile emoticon
She is not sure when she will have the surgery but she thinks it will be soon and she will be healthy for the Texas Journey of Hope in October.
Please keep praying for her. We all need her healthy.
Peace,
Bill
Friday, August 13, 2010
Warden critical of death penalty
By Lynne Tuohy, published in the Nashua Telegraph
A former prison warden who carried out eight executions urged a New Hampshire commission Thursday to stay away from the practice, saying the memories of those he has put to death haunt him.
“It’s nothing but a premeditated, ceremonial killing, and we do it to appease politicians who are tough on crime,” Ron McAndrew said after his testifying at the Legislative Office Building. “The state has no right to ask people to kill others on their behalf.”
McAndrew, a former warden in Florida and Texas and now living in Florida as a prison consultant, said he supported the death penalty until “these men came and started sitting at the edge of my bed at night.”
McAndrew helped perform three electrocutions in Florida and oversaw five lethal injections in Texas. Since he has been speaking out against the death penalty, he said, many former corrections officers who participated in executions have sought his counsel.
“We spent hours on the phone, trying to process the horror we went through,” McAndrew told the panel. “We never admitted it at the time. That would have shown weakness in a job that demanded strength.”
“I implore you, don’t get into this business,” McAndrew told the commission. “Honor your corrections officers and don’t force them to go through what I went through – what so many of us have gone through and have suffered for.”
The last execution in New Hampshire took place in 1939. The state has one convict on death row, cop killer Michael Addison, whose appeals have just begun to wend their way through the courts. The state Supreme Court is still shaping how to evaluate the fairness of the state’s death penalty laws.
Since October, the New Hampshire Commission to Study the Death Penalty has heard testimony from both advocates and opponents of the death penalty and is scheduled to issue its report in November.
Testimony included people on both sides of the debate, from a relatives of a crime victim to a law expert.
Laura Bonk, a Concord woman whose mother was murdered in Massachusetts in 1989, urged the panel to repeal the death penalty.
She told them Thursday would have been her mother’s 69th birthday. Bonk’s sister, 16 at the time, was also shot by the son of a sick friend her mother was visiting in Littleton, Mass.
“My mother was opposed to the death penalty,” Bonk said. “I ask you to recommend repeal. It would honor me and, most of all, my mother.”
Bonk said her aunt called three years ago to tell her the killer died in prison of natural causes. She told the panel his death brought no comfort or closure.
“It does not lessen the pain,” she said. “It does not help victims heal.”
The panel also heard from New York Law School professor Robert Blecker, who argued in favor of keeping the death penalty but applying it “only to the worst of the worst of the worst.”
Those who kill during drug transactions should not be death be death-penalty eligible, he said, adding, “It is understood in the drug game that there are certain killing offenses.”
He also would exempt from the death penalty battered spouses who hire a killer.
Acknowledging that his opinion would not be popular in New Hampshire, Blecker also said a robber who shoots an officer to avoid capture – the scenario in Addison’s killing of Manchester Officer Michael Briggs – should not be subjected to a death sentence.
“I revere police officers, but they are strapping on a gun as a condition of employment,” Blecker said. Killing a juror should be added to the list of crimes eligible for death, he said.
Also, Blecker said, the commission should not view life without parole as a viable alternative to a death sentence, saying “lifers” typically earn the most privileges and get the best jobs behind bars.
He said he visited the state prison Wednesday and saw inmates painting, sculpting, building furniture and playing sports outdoors. Panel member and defense attorney Lawrence Vogelman noted that Blecker appeared angry while describing his prison visit.
“I am angry,” Blecker said. “I see justice not being done. I know they have murdered heinously and they spend their day in play.”
Blecker also said he opposes lethal injection because executions should involve pain.
“For the torture killers, for the rapist killer of children, a quick but painful death sometimes is the only response,” Blecker said. “It’s more appropriate than an opiate haze.”
A former prison warden who carried out eight executions urged a New Hampshire commission Thursday to stay away from the practice, saying the memories of those he has put to death haunt him.
“It’s nothing but a premeditated, ceremonial killing, and we do it to appease politicians who are tough on crime,” Ron McAndrew said after his testifying at the Legislative Office Building. “The state has no right to ask people to kill others on their behalf.”
McAndrew, a former warden in Florida and Texas and now living in Florida as a prison consultant, said he supported the death penalty until “these men came and started sitting at the edge of my bed at night.”
McAndrew helped perform three electrocutions in Florida and oversaw five lethal injections in Texas. Since he has been speaking out against the death penalty, he said, many former corrections officers who participated in executions have sought his counsel.
“We spent hours on the phone, trying to process the horror we went through,” McAndrew told the panel. “We never admitted it at the time. That would have shown weakness in a job that demanded strength.”
“I implore you, don’t get into this business,” McAndrew told the commission. “Honor your corrections officers and don’t force them to go through what I went through – what so many of us have gone through and have suffered for.”
The last execution in New Hampshire took place in 1939. The state has one convict on death row, cop killer Michael Addison, whose appeals have just begun to wend their way through the courts. The state Supreme Court is still shaping how to evaluate the fairness of the state’s death penalty laws.
Since October, the New Hampshire Commission to Study the Death Penalty has heard testimony from both advocates and opponents of the death penalty and is scheduled to issue its report in November.
Testimony included people on both sides of the debate, from a relatives of a crime victim to a law expert.
Laura Bonk, a Concord woman whose mother was murdered in Massachusetts in 1989, urged the panel to repeal the death penalty.
She told them Thursday would have been her mother’s 69th birthday. Bonk’s sister, 16 at the time, was also shot by the son of a sick friend her mother was visiting in Littleton, Mass.
“My mother was opposed to the death penalty,” Bonk said. “I ask you to recommend repeal. It would honor me and, most of all, my mother.”
Bonk said her aunt called three years ago to tell her the killer died in prison of natural causes. She told the panel his death brought no comfort or closure.
“It does not lessen the pain,” she said. “It does not help victims heal.”
The panel also heard from New York Law School professor Robert Blecker, who argued in favor of keeping the death penalty but applying it “only to the worst of the worst of the worst.”
Those who kill during drug transactions should not be death be death-penalty eligible, he said, adding, “It is understood in the drug game that there are certain killing offenses.”
He also would exempt from the death penalty battered spouses who hire a killer.
Acknowledging that his opinion would not be popular in New Hampshire, Blecker also said a robber who shoots an officer to avoid capture – the scenario in Addison’s killing of Manchester Officer Michael Briggs – should not be subjected to a death sentence.
“I revere police officers, but they are strapping on a gun as a condition of employment,” Blecker said. Killing a juror should be added to the list of crimes eligible for death, he said.
Also, Blecker said, the commission should not view life without parole as a viable alternative to a death sentence, saying “lifers” typically earn the most privileges and get the best jobs behind bars.
He said he visited the state prison Wednesday and saw inmates painting, sculpting, building furniture and playing sports outdoors. Panel member and defense attorney Lawrence Vogelman noted that Blecker appeared angry while describing his prison visit.
“I am angry,” Blecker said. “I see justice not being done. I know they have murdered heinously and they spend their day in play.”
Blecker also said he opposes lethal injection because executions should involve pain.
“For the torture killers, for the rapist killer of children, a quick but painful death sometimes is the only response,” Blecker said. “It’s more appropriate than an opiate haze.”
Thursday, August 12, 2010
Sister Helen will be at The Kairos Conference November 15-17
Mark your calendars! The Kairos Conference: Discerning Justice and Taking Action on the Death Penalty is happening on November 16-17, 2010 in Atlanta, GA.
This unique event is brought to you by People of Faith Against the Death Penalty (PFADP) and Sister Helen Prejean, acclaimed author of Dead Man Walking. Engage with religious leaders, get energized, learn new skills for mobilizing faith communities to work for an end to the death penalty.
From PFADP: People of Faith Against the Death Penalty
NC Racial Justice Act NC Moratorium Now What You Can Do Stop Scheduled Executions Project Link The Abolition Petition For Whom the Bells Toll
THE KAIROS CONFERENCE
People of Faith Against the Death Penalty's National Conference
Emory University Atlanta, GA -- Sr. Helen Prejean, Honorary Chair
Please save the date to attend the first national interfaith conference on religious action on the death penalty in the United States this century. We will be posting more information soon, including a link to our Kairos Conference website where you will be able to register for this exciting conference and learn more information about it.
To pre-register for the conference, click here
Please email kairos (at) pfadp (dot) org with any questions or call our office at 919.933.7567.
Sponsored by People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, this seminal conference will be held at Emory University's Conference Center Hotel November 16 & 17, 2010.
The conference is part of a new effort to help the abolition movement build new levels of support among religious communities across the country.
Who should attend this conference:
* You!
* Your pastor and staff
* Senior clergy and staff of religious judicatory bodies and associations
* Clergy
* Death penalty abolition activists
* Your friends and colleagues
Support for this conference comes from the Open Society Institute, the Proteus Action League, the Fund for Nonviolence, and PFADP's individual members and congregations across the United States.
It's a new day for the abolition movement, one that more and more religious leaders are awakening to. Come to this conference and engage with fellow abolitionists and religious leaders and in so doing bolster the efforts toward reform and repeal in every state in America.
Please forward this message to your friends by clicking here
©2009 info@pfadp.org
This unique event is brought to you by People of Faith Against the Death Penalty (PFADP) and Sister Helen Prejean, acclaimed author of Dead Man Walking. Engage with religious leaders, get energized, learn new skills for mobilizing faith communities to work for an end to the death penalty.
From PFADP: People of Faith Against the Death Penalty
NC Racial Justice Act NC Moratorium Now What You Can Do Stop Scheduled Executions Project Link The Abolition Petition For Whom the Bells Toll
THE KAIROS CONFERENCE
People of Faith Against the Death Penalty's National Conference
Emory University Atlanta, GA -- Sr. Helen Prejean, Honorary Chair
Please save the date to attend the first national interfaith conference on religious action on the death penalty in the United States this century. We will be posting more information soon, including a link to our Kairos Conference website where you will be able to register for this exciting conference and learn more information about it.
To pre-register for the conference, click here
Please email kairos (at) pfadp (dot) org with any questions or call our office at 919.933.7567.
Sponsored by People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, this seminal conference will be held at Emory University's Conference Center Hotel November 16 & 17, 2010.
The conference is part of a new effort to help the abolition movement build new levels of support among religious communities across the country.
Who should attend this conference:
* You!
* Your pastor and staff
* Senior clergy and staff of religious judicatory bodies and associations
* Clergy
* Death penalty abolition activists
* Your friends and colleagues
Support for this conference comes from the Open Society Institute, the Proteus Action League, the Fund for Nonviolence, and PFADP's individual members and congregations across the United States.
It's a new day for the abolition movement, one that more and more religious leaders are awakening to. Come to this conference and engage with fellow abolitionists and religious leaders and in so doing bolster the efforts toward reform and repeal in every state in America.
Please forward this message to your friends by clicking here
©2009 info@pfadp.org
Monday, August 09, 2010
Another Murder Victim's Family Opposes Death Penalty
A Philadelphia suburban district attorney has announced that he will not seek the death penalty against a woman and her lover for the June murder of the woman's husband, Kevin Mengel.
Chester County DA Joe Carroll said the case does not meet the conditions required to pursue the death penalty.
Carroll also noted that the victim's parents did not want the death penalty for their son's murderers. And that is why I am writing this.
Whenever I write or speak about my opposition to the death penalty, I invariably hear from death penalty proponents who argue that killing the killer serves the best interests of the victim's family, giving them closure. But not all families are thirsty for revenge. This Chester County case is one example of that. So are the cases of the many family members who form the organization Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation (MVFR). Founded in 1976, MVFR actively works for abolition of the death penalty in all states that still use it.
These enlightened souls offer a wide variety of reasons for their opposition to the death penalty:
• Endless trials re-open emotional wounds and put off the time when real healing can begin.
• The vast resources and attention spent on the death penalty is better spent supporting crime victims and their families, and preventing crime in the first place.
• The risk of executing the innocent -- something that appears to have happened in more than one known case -- is too high a price to pay.
• Biases of geography, race, and class plague the system.
• Executions create more families who have lost a loved one to killing.
• And many think it is just plain wrong for the state to kill.
MVFR's perspectives are shared by a growing majority of the world community. Indeed, there is an unmistakable worldwide trend towards abolition of the death penalty. According to Amnesty International (AI), "Since 1990, an average of three countries each year have abolished the death penalty, and today over two-thirds of the world's nations have ended capital punishment in law or practice." AI calls the death penalty "the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights."
In maintaining the death penalty here in the U.S., we align ourselves with the other executing nations of the world such as Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, and a handful of other countries known for their systematic violations of human rights.
It's been said that you are the company you keep.
Shouldn't we instead keep company with those who are less barbaric?
Some may accuse death penalty opponents of being soft on crime. But we don't want to free the criminals, we want to lock them up for life without parole. And isn't life in prison actually a harsher punishment than death? When the execution is done, the punishment is over. With life in prison, the punishment lasts much longer.
And, of course, killing a killer will never bring the victim back. It's just more killing.
Haven't we had enough killing?
By Mary Shaw, published in the OpEdNews.com
Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist, with a focus on politics, human rights, and social justice. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views appear regularly in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated.
www.maryshawonline.com
Chester County DA Joe Carroll said the case does not meet the conditions required to pursue the death penalty.
Carroll also noted that the victim's parents did not want the death penalty for their son's murderers. And that is why I am writing this.
Whenever I write or speak about my opposition to the death penalty, I invariably hear from death penalty proponents who argue that killing the killer serves the best interests of the victim's family, giving them closure. But not all families are thirsty for revenge. This Chester County case is one example of that. So are the cases of the many family members who form the organization Murder Victims' Families for Reconciliation (MVFR). Founded in 1976, MVFR actively works for abolition of the death penalty in all states that still use it.
These enlightened souls offer a wide variety of reasons for their opposition to the death penalty:
• Endless trials re-open emotional wounds and put off the time when real healing can begin.
• The vast resources and attention spent on the death penalty is better spent supporting crime victims and their families, and preventing crime in the first place.
• The risk of executing the innocent -- something that appears to have happened in more than one known case -- is too high a price to pay.
• Biases of geography, race, and class plague the system.
• Executions create more families who have lost a loved one to killing.
• And many think it is just plain wrong for the state to kill.
MVFR's perspectives are shared by a growing majority of the world community. Indeed, there is an unmistakable worldwide trend towards abolition of the death penalty. According to Amnesty International (AI), "Since 1990, an average of three countries each year have abolished the death penalty, and today over two-thirds of the world's nations have ended capital punishment in law or practice." AI calls the death penalty "the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights."
In maintaining the death penalty here in the U.S., we align ourselves with the other executing nations of the world such as Afghanistan, China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Zimbabwe, and a handful of other countries known for their systematic violations of human rights.
It's been said that you are the company you keep.
Shouldn't we instead keep company with those who are less barbaric?
Some may accuse death penalty opponents of being soft on crime. But we don't want to free the criminals, we want to lock them up for life without parole. And isn't life in prison actually a harsher punishment than death? When the execution is done, the punishment is over. With life in prison, the punishment lasts much longer.
And, of course, killing a killer will never bring the victim back. It's just more killing.
Haven't we had enough killing?
By Mary Shaw, published in the OpEdNews.com
Mary Shaw is a Philadelphia-based writer and activist, with a focus on politics, human rights, and social justice. She is a former Philadelphia Area Coordinator for the Nobel-Prize-winning human rights group Amnesty International, and her views appear regularly in a variety of newspapers, magazines, and websites. Note that the ideas expressed here are the author's own, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amnesty International or any other organization with which she may be associated.
www.maryshawonline.com
Sunday, August 08, 2010
First North Carolina Death Row Inmates File Appeal Under Racial Justice Act
See original links and continually updating items here
Five men on North Carolina’s death row filed motions to have their death sentences reduced to life without parole based on data that indicate racial disparities in the state’s justice system. These cases are the first to request application of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, which allows the use of statewide or regional statistical studies to challenge a death sentence because of racial bias. In all five cases, the victims in the underlying murder were white and the defendants were black. Moreover, prosecutors struck eligible blacks from the juries in these cases at greater rates than whites. In some cases, prosecutors struck eligible black jurors while accepting similar white jurors. Ken Rose, staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), said, “We would like to live and practice in a system where race does not matter. But the results show that white victims are valued more highly than black ones, and that black jurors are being denied their right to serve. This evidence of racial bias cannot be ignored.”
Five men on North Carolina’s death row filed motions to have their death sentences reduced to life without parole based on data that indicate racial disparities in the state’s justice system. These cases are the first to request application of North Carolina’s Racial Justice Act, which allows the use of statewide or regional statistical studies to challenge a death sentence because of racial bias. In all five cases, the victims in the underlying murder were white and the defendants were black. Moreover, prosecutors struck eligible blacks from the juries in these cases at greater rates than whites. In some cases, prosecutors struck eligible black jurors while accepting similar white jurors. Ken Rose, staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation (CDPL), said, “We would like to live and practice in a system where race does not matter. But the results show that white victims are valued more highly than black ones, and that black jurors are being denied their right to serve. This evidence of racial bias cannot be ignored.”
Friday, August 06, 2010
Will a Mailroom Mix-up Send an Inmate to his Death?
Cory Maples
Latest from Death Penalty Information Center
Alabama Inmate May Face Execution Because of Mail-room Mix-Up
Posted: August 05, 2010
Cory Maples, an inmate on Alabama’s death row, may pay for a simple clerical error with his life. When copies of an Alabama court ruling in his case were sent to the New York law firm handling his appeals, both copies were returned unopened because the firm's attorneys representing Maples had left the firm.
By the time the error was discovered, Maples’s time to appeal had expired. So far, the firm has failed to persuade a federal appeals court to waive the deadline for filing an appeal. Maples's new attorney is arguing that Maples should not be penalized for a mistake he did not commit.
Prof. Deborah Rhode, an authority on indigent defense and legal ethics at Stanford, said, “Maples’s case is a textbook illustration of why the doctrine of imputing responsibility to the client for a lawyer’s mistake is so out of touch with reality.” Alabama is the only state that does not provide lawyers for all indigent death row inmates to challenge their convictions. Hence, defendants rely on volunteer attorneys, often from out of state, to fill the gap, and that contributed to the confusion.
To read more on this and other current cases/issues, plz GO here
TX: Re-examining the evidence in Willingham case
"All Texans, including those who support the death penalty, should want to know the truth -- and to make certain that no one's life is taken erroneously in our name."
excerpt from article below
If an automaker discovers that a faulty design is making some of its cars accelerate without warning, the company doesn't just make fixes going forward, it inspects older models to repair the defect.
If a material used in manufacturing, such as lead paint, is a health hazard, the government doesn't just block its sale but requires the product's removal to prevent harm.
If Texas used flawed science to convict criminal defendants of arson, why wouldn't it be imperative to re-examine the evidence to make sure that previous findings are accurate and to avoid recurrences?
That's the big-picture question looming over the Texas Forensic Science Commission's investigation into the case of Cameron Todd Willingham.
Texas executed Willingham in 2004. The Corsicana man had been convicted 12 years earlier of setting a fire that killed his three daughters shortly before Christmas 1991.
Because of a complaint about the techniques used for that arson finding, the commission hired a Baltimore fire expert to review the case. He concluded that the original investigation used outdated forensic methods and that the fire might not have been deliberate. Now, the commission must decide if officials engaged in negligence or professional misconduct.
After lengthy discussion at a July 23 meeting, commission members agreed to gather more information and accept public comments, then meet in mid-September to hash out a report on the case.
All four members of a panel that looked at the Willingham case seemed to agree that the Corsicana Fire Department and Texas Fire Marshal's office relied on flawed science to determine that arson occurred. But members didn't agree on where that leads.
More modern forensic methods were published in 1992, the same month Willingham was charged. It took a few years for them to get widely accepted.
Commission Chairman John Bradley said there wasn't enough evidence to say investigators were negligent. But other members weren't ready to draw definitive conclusions.
Sarah Kerrigan, a Sam Houston State University forensic science professor, said it is a stretch to expect field investigators to be familiar with all the details in scientific literature.
"Professional ignorance is not professional negligence or misconduct," she said. But she supported collecting more input on how widely the updated methods were being used in the early 1990s.
Criminal defense attorney Lance Evans of Fort Worth said he wants to learn what kind of training the investigators received and whether they met whatever standards they had been trained to follow.
Kerrigan said, "There's no question that the science was flawed, and this has far-reaching consequences for this particular discipline well beyond this case."
Commission findings could affect scores of inmates convicted of arson.
But the political pressure and national attention surrounding the inquiry shouldn't drive the report that the commission is expected to vote on in October.
The commission can't issue a judgment on Willingham's guilt or innocence. Its mission is to determine the credibility of forensic procedures used in pursuing criminal convictions. Faulty procedures must be corrected.
If official negligence or misconduct took place, the state must answer for that. But even if the evidence doesn't clearly show wrongdoing, a conviction based on bad science might still mean a wrongful execution. If so, there must be mechanisms in the legal system to make amends and avoid such an unacceptable mistake.
All Texans, including those who support the death penalty, should want to know the truth -- and to make certain that no one's life is taken erroneously in our name.
Source of this article here
Cameron Todd Willingham – Innocent and Executed
Aug 25, 2009 ... Sign the petition to Governor Rick Perry and the State of Texas
here
Cameron Todd Willingham, Texas, and the death penalty : The New Yorker
Sep 7, 2009 here
Also the following brief, more recent, report, was found at Death Penalty Information Center GO here
Texas Commission Says Case of Executed Man Based on Flawed Science
Posted: July 28, 2010
In a preliminary report, the Texas Forensic Science Commission recently found that fire investigators used flawed science in the case that led to the death sentence and execution of Cameron Todd Willingham. Willingham was executed in 2004, having been convicted of setting the fire that killed his three children. Willingham had always maintained his innocence and said the fire could have been an accident. The Commission acknowledged that new fire investigation standards were developed in 1992, the year Willingham was convicted, but said the standards were not adopted nationally until several years later. Hence, the Commission did not find professional negligence on the part of the investigators because they were relying on standards available at the time. Nevertheless, the jury convicted Willingham on the basis of the flawed evidence and Texas may have executed an innocent man. Patricia Cox, Willingham’s cousin, told the Commission, "Even though there may not have been any malice or intent by fire investigators about not being informed on current standards, that doesn't excuse the fact that, based on this misinformation, Cameron Todd Willingham was executed, and that can't be corrected."
Thursday, August 05, 2010
The Entire US Prison System Needs Overhaul
A flawed system? U.S. boasts highest prison incarceration numbers in world.
The United States of America currently incarcerates the highest percentage of its own citizens when compared to any other country in the world. With it's harsh drug laws, minimum sentencing guidelines and repeated imprisonment of non-violent offenders, the country has literally thrown the shackles on millions of individuals. In fact, the great superpower has more than 2 million of it's citizens imprisoned at this very moment. (some suggest numbers closer to 2.5 million)
To see graph, charts and more depicting the most recent data obtained concerning incarceration levels in the United States - With it's harsh drug laws, minimum sentencing guidelines and repeated imprisonment of non-violent offenders, the country has literally thrown the shackles on millions of individuals. In fact, the great superpower has more than 2 million of it's citizens imprisoned at this very moment - GO here
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America's Solitary Confinement Nightmare:
Of course we torture, Ridgeway says. Right here in America. In our own prisons. An estimated 80,000 Americans are in solitary confinement. GO here
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In Case Missed It:
Torture Inc. Americas Brutal Prisons: Video Documentary:
Savaged by dogs, Electrocuted With Cattle Prods, Burned By Toxic Chemicals, Does such barbaric abuse inside U.S. jails explain the horrors that were committed in Iraq? Warning Strong Images, etc. GO here
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Tuesday, August 03, 2010
Ohio may execute an innocent man -- Plz take action
SIGN NOW PLZ GO here
Kevin Keith is scheduled to be executed on September 15th, despite a wide range of new evidence that suggests he is innocent. Kevin, who has been on Ohio's death row for 16 years, was convicted on the basis of faulty eyewitness identification.
Thirteen years after he was convicted, Kevin discovered that one of the State's supposed "witnesses" -- a hospital nurse who was critical to corroborating the legitimacy of the surviving victim's eyewitness identification -- does not actually exist. He has an alibi affirmed by four people and new evidence has emerged implicating another suspect.
No court has heard the full array of new evidence pointing to Kevin's innocence. Take action today to stop Ohio from executing a man who very well may be innocent.
Save Kevin Keith: Innocence Matters
Target: Governor Ted Strickland and the Ohio Parole Board
Sponsored by: Death Penalty Focus
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