As Executions Resume, So Do Questions of Fairness
RALEIGH, N.C. - The release of the third death row inmate in six months in North Carolina last week is raising fresh questions about whether states are supplying capital-murder defendants with adequate counsel, even as an execution on Tuesday night in Georgia ended a seven-month national suspension.
In all three cases, North Carolina appeals courts found that evidence that would have favored the defendants was withheld from defense lawyers by prosecutors or investigators. In two of the cases, including that of Levon Jones, who was released on Friday after 14 years on death row, the courts said the defendants’ lawyers had failed to mount an adequate defense. Nationwide, Mr. Jones’s release was the sixth in a year.
John Holdridge, director of the A.C.L.U. Capital Punishment Project, which provided representation for Mr. Jones, said the successful appeals showed that the problem with the death penalty was not the method of execution - the issue ruled on by the Supreme Court last month - but instead “poor people getting lousy lawyers.”
“All these states are gearing up to start executing people again, and nobody seems to be concerned about these systemic problems,” Mr. Holdridge said.
On Tuesday evening, after the Supreme Court declined to stop it, the State of Georgia conducted the first execution since the court ruled last month that a method of lethal injection was not unconstitutional. William E. Lynd, 53, was put to death by injection for the 1988 killing of his girlfriend, Ginger Moore. No prisoners had been executed in the United States since last September, while the court was considering the issue.
During that same period, Georgia’s new public defender system came under attack by politicians and was recently forced to cut more than 40 positions.
That system, established after a series of lawsuits, was patterned after one North Carolina put in place in 2001, which was considered a national model. But not many other states have followed suit, said Robin Maher, director of the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Representation Project.
“I wish I could say that things have gotten a lot better, but in fact I can say with confidence that things have changed not much at all,” Ms. Maher said. “We are seeing the same kinds of egregiously bad lawyering that we saw 10 or 15 years ago, for a variety of reasons, including inadequate funding.”
Of the 36 states that allow the death penalty, only about 10 have statewide capital-defense systems, one of the practices recommended by the Bar Association.
The three men released in North Carolina were all convicted in the mid-1990s, before a barrage of criticism of the state’s capital punishment system, including an investigation in 2000 by The Charlotte Observer that showed that 16 death row inmates had been represented by lawyers who were later disbarred.
North Carolina made a number of changes that included establishing the statewide defender system and broader discovery rules for defense lawyers. Beginning in 1996, defense lawyers working on appeals in death penalty cases were permitted to view all investigative files pertaining to the case, and in 2004 the same right was extended to the defense in all criminal cases.
Joseph B. Cheshire, the lawyer for one of the three released men, Jonathon Hoffman, credited the discovery rules with bringing to light what he called a pattern of wrongful convictions.
The court-appointed trial lawyers for Mr. Hoffman, convicted of killing a jewelry store owner during a robbery, were not told that the main witness against him had been paid for his cooperation and was given immunity from prosecution and a reduced sentence for bank robbery. Mr. Cheshire said that a copy of the district attorney’s notes was altered to conceal those facts before they were provided to the defense for discovery. Mr. Hoffman was released in December.
Mr. Cheshire is also the chairman of the state’s Indigent Defense Services Commission. Thanks to those two changes, he said, “the likelihood today of someone being convicted who’s innocent is far less than it was five or six years ago.”
The man who prosecuted Mr. Jones, however, does not concede that the defendant was innocent. The prosecutor, G. Dewey Hudson, said that he still believed that Mr. Jones was involved in the murder, but that he could not retry him because crucial witnesses had died and one had recanted.
“It has taken 15 years for the court system to make the determination that Mr. Jones’s original counsel was ineffective,” Mr. Hudson said in a statement released Friday. “As a result of this delay, the State has been severely handcuffed in its obligation to prosecute Mr. Jones for the murder of Leamon Grady.”
Cassy Stubbs, the A.C.L.U. lawyer who represented Mr. Jones, said all of the witnesses from the initial trial were still living.
Mr. Jones was convicted of robbing and shooting Mr. Grady, a bootlegger in Duplin County. The main witness against Mr. Jones was a former girlfriend, Lovely Lorden, who testified that she had gone with him to Mr. Grady’s house the night of the killing and heard gunshots while waiting outside.
State courts rejected Mr. Jones’s claims of ineffective legal counsel. But a federal judge, Terrence W. Boyle, later found that Mr. Jones’s trial lawyers failed to do a background check that would have revealed Ms. Lorden’s criminal background, failed to interview her before trial and failed to obtain copies of inconsistent statements she made. They also failed to present evidence that Mr. Jones might be mentally ill, cognitively impaired, or had a history of substance abuse, the judge found, information that could have saved him from a death sentence.
“Jones received two appointed attorneys that spent virtually no time or effort investigating the offense or his background,” Judge Boyle said.
In subsequent hearings and affidavits, it became clear that Ms. Lorden was a frequent police informant and that, contrary to testimony at the trial, she had known when she came forward in the Grady case that there was a $4,000 reward available.
Though Ms. Stubbs said that there was evidence that pointed to another man in the killing, Mr. Hudson said in a telephone interview that he considered the case closed.
Mr. Jones’s release came on the heels of that of Glen E. Chapman, who was convicted of killing two women, Betty Jean Ramseur and Tenene Y. Conley, in Union County in 1992. Judge Robert C. Ervin of State Superior Court ruled in April that Mr. Chapman’s lawyers had failed their client, noting that one of them could recall interviewing only one witness and had visited the crime scenes for the first time two weeks before trial. The lawyers had both admitted to heavy drinking during other trials.
Judge Ervin also found that Dennis Rhoney, then a police detective, knowingly presented false and misleading information on the stand. The State Bureau of Investigation is reviewing perjury claims against Mr. Rhoney.
© 2008 The New York Times
For a long time I have been a victim rights advocate. My sympathy towards the victims and contempt towards the killers gave me all the fuel I needed to support the death penalty. I did. I chanted with the conservatives about the “bleeding heart liberals” and I raised my voice to “fry the f*&ker!”
I was wrong.
I can no longer support capitol punishment and it was wrong to support it in the first place.
In today’s world, it is impossible to trust what you see or what you hear. Anything can be manipulated. The truth is, you will see exactly what you are expected to see.
If you saw the video that the VA Tech shooter made before he went on his killing spree you will notice that significant portions of it are missing. The portions you are allowed to see make no sense and appear like insane ramblings. What did he REALLY have to say and why was it cut?
The ‘execution’ (lynching) of Saddam Hussein was likewise altered by CNN so the taunting could not be heard and it appeared more ‘professional’.
So if the media tells you this ‘bad guy’ deserves to be executed because he did this or that, it is always questionable. The media was largely responsible for demonizing and promoting the death penalty for Barbara Graham, who was executed based on circumstantial evidence.
Without even getting into the humanity of execution, there are too many holes, too many errors, and too many lies to support it. There are so many false imprisonments. See the link:
http://www.divinecaroline.com/article/22356/35817
We all need to evolve past our desire to end a person’s life.
The point is the State/ Country are doing exactly the same thing as the person is accused of. Quite often as we all know the accused have no effective defence, evidence is corrupted or withheld. It is also illogical, why kill a killer, when a rapist doesn’t get raped nor is any other crime answered with similar punishment.
It’s based on religion, these EYE FOR AN EYE people who don’t think for themselves but chant rubbish quite often repeating what their religious leader said.
No civilised country kills its citizens any more because it’s completely ineffective, all it does is give the victim’s family revenge and then only if the accused was given a fair trial.
The man quoted spent 14 years of his life locked in a cell awaiting to be murdered, isn’t that something to be ashamed of, how depraved can a country become.
Carry on reading the bible one day you may wake up and discover you’ve been deceived.
I do believe there are 10 rules written in stone, the 6th one is:-
THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
Just that, no variations, no exceptions. No reference to a mans colour or wealth.
95% of Americans go to church but only a very small percentage are Christians.
“The court-appointed trial lawyers for Mr. Hoffman, convicted of killing a jewelry store owner during a robbery, were not told that the main witness against him had been paid for his cooperation and was given immunity from prosecution and a reduced sentence for bank robbery. Mr. Cheshire said that a copy of the district attorney’s notes was altered to conceal those facts before they were provided to the defense for discovery. Mr. Hoffman was released in December.”
To have justice, the D.A. should be put on trial for obstruction of justice.
There is no justice for the poor, sick, and friendless.
The reason there are so many wrongful convictions is that no jurisdiction holds individual prosecutors or police accountable for them. The state pays compensation but the people who caused the problem continue to falsify evidence, force confessions and otherwise interfere with finding out the truth. As long as we have an adversarial system that values winning over justice, we will have wrongful convictions aplenty.
Good for you TheLorax. Justice is fallible. Death is final.
I am a confirmed evolutionist. Homo sapiens sapiens, i.e. as what we humans are classified has reached this level as a result of eons of evolution. Our evolution is an ongoing process even at the present. So far, we have reached a level of human-ness, i.e., humanity.(There are some our species us who appear to have devolved into retrogrades, if you know what I mean.)I think that altruism proofed a means for us to progress as a group; the pits and perils were overcome due to cooperative efforts; that rugged individualism led to dead ends. Our future in surviving as species rests on recognizing human ity is not the pinnacle. There is at least one more level to which i think we naturally aspire and that is Humane ity, i.e., Humaneness. Outlawing the Death Penalty is the high road we must tread to reach that plateau.
We proudly proclaim in the Preamble to the Constitution that “life” in an “inalienable” right. To those who would claim that someone who takes a life forfeits his or her right to , where is it written in the Constitution that you have an endowed inalienable right to deny an inalienable right. If you as an individual person do not have such a right, then neither you nor a collection of persons, i.e., people, do not have that right and you cannot delegate an authority that you do not have singly or collectively to a government of the people.
Consequently, would not capital punishment be a violation of the U.S. Constitution
“It’s based on religion, these EYE FOR AN EYE people who don’t think for themselves but chant rubbish quite often repeating what their religious leader said.”
A huge number of our laws are based on religion, “Christian” religion, including all “vice” laws, the war on drugs, and until it was repealed, the prohibition of alcohol. The war on drugs has been compounded to disregard other constitutiona guarantees such as unreasonable search and seizure, the loss of property without due process (asset forfiture), etc. Doesn’t the first amendment prohibit the establishment of a state religion, which are exacty what these laws, including the death penalty do?
Now that the Supremes have spoken with the evil wisdom of Scalia and the stupidity of Thomas, a number of States are salivating at the chance to reduce their huge prison populations (the USA, with 5% of the population has 25% of all those in jail across the World - do that say something?)
Too bad the eager executioners can’t watch the smoke and steam rising from the condemned when the switch is thrown as in the good old days.
Of course the case can be made that execution is more humane than locking up criminals up for 40 years in a super max solitary cell.
Never mind that poor bastard who spent 27 years before DNA proved he was innocent.
what is this man to do after being in jail for so long? is he awarded some type of financial help while he gets back on his feet?