UPDATE: (10-29-10)  AN UNSPEAKABLE TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE

Texas Monthly is reporting ...

"For eighteen years Anthony Graves insisted that he had nothing to do with the gruesome murder of a family in Somerville. That’s exactly how long it took for justice to finally be served."

"At the recommendation of the Burleson County district attorney’s office, state district judge Reva Towslee-Corbett signed a motion that stated, simply, 'We have found no credible evidence which inculpates this defendant.' In other words, all capital murder charges were dropped."

"Former Harris County assistant district attorney Kelly Siegler, who has sent nineteen men to death row in her career, went even further in her statements. Siegler laid the blame for Graves’s wrongful conviction squarely at the feet of former Burleson County D.A. Charles Sebesta. 'Charles Sebesta handled this case in a way that would best be described as a criminal justice system’s nightmare,' Siegler said. Over the past month, she explained, she and her investigator, retired Texas Ranger Otto Hanak, reviewed what had happened at Graves’s trial. After talking to witnesses and studying documents, they were appalled by what they found. 'It’s a prosecutor’s responsibility to never fabricate evidence or manipulate witnesses or take advantage of victims,' she said. 'And unfortunately, what happened in this case is all of these things.' Graves’s trial, she said, was 'a travesty.'”

UPDATE: (03-19-09)  SCARING MYSELF: I AM AGREEING WITH A LIBERAL DEMOCRAT

According to Law.com ...

"Gov. Bill Richardson, who has supported capital punishment, signed legislation to repeal New Mexico's death penalty, calling it the 'most difficult decision in my political life.'

The new law replaces lethal injection with a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. The repeal takes effect on July 1, and applies only to crimes committed after that date.

" 'Regardless of my personal opinion about the death penalty, I do not have confidence in the criminal justice system as it currently operates to be the final arbiter when it comes to who lives and who dies for their crime,' Richardson said."

I never though I would find common ground with a liberal democrat on matters of social interest, but there you have it. We both agree that the system is so flawed, that the death penalty cannot be applied with any certainty. Especially in an era of politically-motivated prosecutors and corrupt police operating from a position of self-interest. DNA, prosecutorial and investigational misconduct has rendered the system unreliable. -- steve

UPDATE: (10-17-08) LAPD ACKNOWLEDGES FINGERPRINT ERRORS

From the Los Angeles Times ... 

"According to a confidential LAPD report obtained by The Times, two people had criminal charges against them dropped because the LAPD's fingerprint print experts erroneously identified them as suspects. The 10-page report said shoddy work and poor oversight have plagued the fingerprint unit and recommended that independent auditors be brought in to determine the scope of the problems."
"LAPD officials said they did not know how many other people might have been wrongly accused over the years as a result of poor fingerprint analysis and did not have the funds to pay for a comprehensive audit to find out."

UPDATE: (08/08/08) EVEN DNA EVIDENCE IS SUBJECT TO PROCEDURAL ERRORS

From Reuters

"Australian police will re-examine 7,000 crimes solved through DNA evidence after a mistake forced detectives to free a suspect wrongly accused of murder."

"Police last month said a DNA sample taken from the murder scene, where Margaret Tapp was strangled and her daughter Seana raped and later killed, matched Gesah after comparison with 400,000 other DNA profiles on a national database."

"Gesah was arrested and faced court, but a later check found the DNA evidence used against him was taken elsewhere and mistakenly tested with samples from the Tapp murder scene."

UPDATE: (04/19/08) PROVING MY POINT

From the Los Angeles Times...

"After 876 days in jail for a murder that prosecutors now say did not happen, Cynthia Sommer knew what she wanted: a fancy coffee drink at Starbucks, followed by a coconut-shrimp dinner at Bully's restaurant."
"Later, she said, she will decide how to pay her legal bills and whether to sue the district attorney for prosecuting her and overlooking evidence that ultimately cleared her of poisoning her Marine husband."
"On Thursday, San Diego County Dist. Atty. Bonnie Dumanis moved to dismiss murder charges against Sommer, telling reporters that overlooked evidence and new scientific scrutiny had poked holes in the prosecution's assertion that she used arsenic to kill Sgt. Todd Sommer."
"It was a startling conclusion to a murder prosecution built on a tabloid-style scenario of a scheming wife poisoning her younger husband, watching as he died and then -- soon after -- getting a $5,400 breast augmentation, partying and having sex with several partners."

"In November a jury convicted Sommer of first-degree murder, but the trial judge overturned the verdict, ruling that prosecutors' description of her 'lifestyle' was so inflammatory that it deprived Sommer of a fair trial."
"She had been convicted of murder with special circumstances -- murder for hire and murder by poison -- that carried a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole. Todd Sommer, 23, was stationed at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station and appeared to be in excellent health when he fell ill and died within days in 2002. Married in 1999, the couple had a son. Cynthia Sommer had three children by a previous marriage."

In response to a discovery motion by Bloom, Sommer's new defense attorney, prosecutors gathered all the tissue samples that had been taken from her husband's body, including some that were not tested before the first trial.
When they had the new samples tested, experts could not find arsenic -- creating what Dumanis called reasonable doubt that Todd Sommer had died of arsenic poisoning. An expert newly hired by the prosecution also suggested that earlier samples in which arsenic was found had been contaminated.
Bloom said it should not have taken a defense motion to make prosecutors gather samples that had remained at the San Diego Naval Medical Center since Todd Sommer's death.
"It's scary how [prosecutors] are dealing with this now," Bloom said. "They're taking credit for doing the right thing. They didn't do the right thing! Justice was done, but not because of the prosecution in this case but despite the prosecution."

She could have easily received the death penalty due to mishandled scientific evidence and an overzealous prosecution team... which proves my point about the need to re-think the capital punishment process.

Original blog entry...

The Supreme Court: the death penalty procedure is constitutional...

According to the Washington Post...

"The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the most common method of lethal injection used to execute condemned prisoners is constitutional, a decision sure to restart the nation's dormant death chambers. But the court's splintered reasoning seems likely to result in more challenges to the way capital punishment is administered in the United States."

"The decision's most likely immediate effect is to dissolve the de facto moratorium on executions that has taken root since the court announced in September that it would decide the case, Baze v. Rees. Just hours after yesterday's decision was announced, Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) lifted the hold he had placed on capital punishment."

But before we start executing prisoners...

Perhaps we need to do another end-to-end review, do confirmatory or exculpatory DNA if such evidence exists to be tested. Review the competency of the prosecutors and defense counsel. And look at the jury composition as a preliminary fairness check of peerage. If any questions are raised, the death sentence can be commuted to life without the possibility of parole. If everything seems legal and there are no further legal appeals, execute the sentence as mandated by law.

Why hesitation is the best policy...

There was a time when I was an advocate of the death penalty for egregious crimes resulting in the death of law enforcement officials, multiple victims and those who were killed during the commission of a crime.

However, the events of the past few years have caused me to rethink my position. It is not so much that I am against the death penalty for those whose actions have resulted in the death of others  as it is that I have come to realize that the process has become tragically flawed.

Far from being a liberal, I have come to believe that the faith and confidence which I unequivocally yielded to our government officials was misplaced.

Primarily, I have found that we are unable to completely trust either our judicial system or our law enforcement officials. Not to say that there are not ethical and honest individuals in both professions, it is just that we must hold these officials to a higher standard when dealing with the death penalty.

Why?

I believe that we have witness an unprecedented amount of unprofessional behavior on the part of law enforcement officials and the judiciary.

The most egregious examples of what I perceive as misconduct are:

• making prosecutorial decisions based on community sentiment or political considerations;
• withholding exculpatory evidence even when such behavior is illegal;
• creating synthetic evidence by using the testimony of "jailhouse" snitches or other witnesses who benefit from making a deal to testify against a person who they briefly met within a controlled setting;
• allowing a co-conspirator to escape the death penalty by providing testimony that results in the death penalty for one or more co-conspirators;
• using questionable or manufactured scientific evidence without a thorough vetting or challenge;
• denying access to modern DNA testing regardless of the cost or legal posture of the court or the prosecution;
• allowing unqualified attorneys to participate in the defense of a capital case;
• using jury consultants to artificially prejudice one-side or another in a capital case;
• allowing the media to taint the jury pool, especially since the media is never excoriated for inaccurate or biased reporting toward their intended audience;
• the lack of death-qualified judges and the general ineptitude of today's juries; and
• allowing law enforcement testimony which shades the truth or is indicative of a lack of good police work because law enforcement "believed" that they had the correct person in custody.

The alternate is not release, it is life without possibility of parole...

Therefore, I believe that the death penalty should be reserved for those who can be proven to have positively committed a crime in which the evidence was not circumstantial, coerced or law enforcement and/or the prosecution did not maintain a hidden personal or professional agenda. Everybody else gets a life sentence without the possibility of parole.

Here are a few cases from Wikipedia which prove the point...

• 1979; Gary Dotson, was the first person whose conviction (in 1979) was overturned because of DNA evidence, in 1989.
• 1981; Clarence Brandley, Montgomery County, Texas, was convicted of capital murder in 1981. In 1989, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Brandley's conviction, finding that police and prosecutors, including James Keeshan, failed to investigate leads pertaining to other suspects, suppressed evidence placing other suspects at crime scene at time of crime, failed to call a witness who didn't support the state's case, allowed the perjured testimony of a witness to go uncorrected, and failed to notify Brandley that another man later confessed to the crime.
• 1982; Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, Pontotoc County, Oklahoma,were intimidated by police into confessions for the 1982 rape and murder of Debra Sue Carter and convicted. In 1999, DNA evidence exonerated them.
• 1983; John Gordon Purvis, Broward County, Florida, a severely mentally ill person, despite no physical evidence that he was even at the scene of the murder, was intimidated by police into confessing to the murder of Susan Hamwi and her daughter in 1983.Later, investigators found that Paul Hamwi, Susan Hamwi's ex-husband, had hired Robert Wayne Beckett Sr. and Paul Serio to murder Susan Hamwi and Purvis was exonerated in 1993.
• 1984; Darryl Hunt, convicted in 1984 of the rape and murder of Deborah Sykes, spent 19 years in prison, 9 of which were served after DNA evidence indicated that he did not commit the rape. Since Hunt was an African-American, the case was heavily charged with the topic of race relations.
• 1984; Juan Melendez was wrongly convicted of the Florida murder of Delbert Baker. He spent over 17 years on Death Row and was released from prison on January 3, 2002.
• 1992; Joshua Rivera, 36, was sentenced 37 years for a 1992 murder. On September 19, 1992, Leonard Aquino was in front of a building and was approached by a couple of men who spoke briefly, then opened fire. Mr. Aquino was killed; another man, Paul Peralta, was shot, but survived. Rivera was known to people in the building and had a conviction for gun possession. He was charged and convicted of the crime. In 2006 Jaime Acevedo confessed he drove the real killer to the murder scene, and that Rivera was not involved.
• 1999; The Tulia incident, in which 46 people, forty who were African-American, were arrested on a drug sting under undercover officer Tom Coleman. Despite the lack of credible evidence, many pled guilty to receive lesser sentences seeing as they would not receive a fair trial (those convicted received harsher sentences). Further investigations and other evidence led to the release of most of the "Tulia 46" by 2004, who were further compensated a total of $6,000,000 collectively to avoid further litigation.
• 2007; Martin Tankleff released from prison and his 1990 conviction quashed after new evidence cast doubt on the police tactics and methods used to gather evidence. He was originally convicted of killing his parents, but new, unspecified, evidence cast serious enough doubt on that to cause an Appeal Court to quash the conviction.
• 2008; a Colorado judge ordered at 22 January 2008 the immediate release of Tim Masters. DNA research by Richard Eikelenboom from Independent Forensic Services in Nunspeet disproved his connection with the death of Peggy Hettrick in 1987 in Fort Collins.

And on the flip side...

I am also dismayed by the incompetence of those who pressed cases against those who I believe should have been found guilty. The notorious O.J. Simpson case comes to mind. Especially where the case was managed as a political show trial. Where evidence was suppressed. Where a law enforcement official was painted as a racist thus nullifying his testimony. For allowing race to enter into the equation. For assigning a celebrity-conscious judge that lacked the ability to control a high profile case. Resulting in a psychopath running free in America.

What can YOU do?

Regardless of how you feel about good versus evil, there are certain people who have committed horrendous acts that require that they forfeit their life. These people should never be allowed to become a threat to any other individual or spread their sick philosophy to others.

Witness the "cult" status accorded to Charles Manson who should have been executed, except for the intervention of the California Supreme Court which halted all death penalties. When the death penalty was reinstated, Manson's sentence had already been commuted and he was spared. Because of the nature of the legal proceedings, Manson will be eligible for parole in 2012, where it is hoped that he will be denied parole for the 12th consecutive time.

For the religious among us who believe that the death penalty is always inappropriate, just consider how many people Manson has influenced over the years.

-- steve

Quote of the day: "A judge is a law student who marks his own examination papers." -- H. L. Mencken

A reminder from OneCitizenSpeaking.com: a large improvement can result from a small change…

The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane. -- Marcus Aurelius

Reference Links:

Justices Uphold Lethal Injection Procedure

Baze v. Rees|United States Supreme Court