[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----MO., NEV., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

April 25





MISSOURI:

State Supreme Court considers death penalty appeal in mid-Missouri case



The Missouri Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday in Jefferson City in 
convicted killer David Hosier’s death penalty appeal.

Hosier was convicted of first degree murder and was sentenced to death for the 
September 2009 killing of Angela Gilpin in Jefferson City. Court documents say 
Hosier was having an affair with Gilpin, who was a married woman.

Hosier, who’s now 64, is also suspected of killing Angela’s husband Rodney 
during the 2009 incident. However, Hosier has not gone to trial for the second 
murder.

The court documents say Hosier was captured after the 2009 murders in Oklahoma, 
after urging Oklahoma officers to shoot him “and get it over with.”

The court documents indicate Oklahoma authorities found 15 guns inside Hosier’s 
vehicle, along with numerous forms of ammunition, a bulletproof vest, gloves, a 
homemade police baton and a knife.

The state Supreme Court heard about 40 minutes of oral arguments in the case on 
Tuesday. Hosier’s public defender, Amy Bartholow, is asking for a new trial, 
saying Hosier’s trial counsel was ineffective.

“We’d also ask, in the alternative, for a new penalty phase where David can 
show, through mental health testimony, mental health expert testimony, why he 
deserved to live,” Bartholow says.

Counselor Bartholow tells the Supreme Court that Hosier’s trial counsel should 
have called a psychiatrist at trial to testify about a stroke and brain damage 
that Hosier had suffered.

“She (the trial counsel) didn’t read a report about the MRI, she never talked 
to a doctor about the MRI,” says Bartholow. “And we’ve placed that in the 
record because it shows that David’s brain is dead in places.”

But Missouri Assistant Attorney General Greg Barnes says Hosier was represented 
by highly-experienced legal counsel.

“Trial counsel, guilt phase trial counsel had over 150 trials worth of 
experience over many years in both Texas and in Missouri,” Barnes tells the 
Supreme Court.

Barnes is critical of Hosier’s death penalty appeal, and questions the public 
defender’s argument that Hosier had a stroke in 2007.

The stroke “didn’t explain the 1986 assault on his wife or his threat to kill 
multiple law enforcement officers or to kidnap his kids and take them to Mexico 
during that time,” says Barnes.

Barnes tells the Supreme Court that “Hail Mary’s is all they’ve got in this 
case,” referring to Hosier’s public defender.

Bartholow tells the Supreme Court that Hosier’s trial counsel should have also 
moved to strike two jurors who she says could not consider life imprisonment. 
The appeal also says the judge who presided over the trial, Cole County Judge 
Patricia M. Joyce, should have recused herself.

The Missouri Supreme Court has not announced when they’ll issue a ruling in the 
case.

Missouri Department of Corrections spokeswoman Karen Pojmann tells Missourinet 
that Hosier is one of 23 Missouri prisoners currently under a death sentence. 
Hosier is incarcerated at the maximum-security Potosi Correctional Center in 
Mineral Point.

Pojmann notes there are no executions scheduled at this time.

(source: Missourinet)








NEVADA:

Death of 4-year-old boy in Las Vegas ruled homicide



The Clark County coroner’s office ruled the death of a 4-year-old boy a 
homicide Tuesday, about a month after prosecutors said they would seek the 
death penalty for the woman accused of torturing and killing him.

Brandon Steckler Jr., a nonverbal autistic boy, was found July 30 in an 
apartment in the 300 block of East Silverado Ranch Boulevard, after he had 
spent weeks in the care of 42-year-old Crystal Stephens. He died at Sunrise 
Hospital and Medical Center the next day from multiple injuries and 
complications, the coroner’s office said Tuesday.

Prosecutors in March said they will seek the death penalty for Stephens, who 
faces charges of murder, first-degree kidnapping, sexual assault on a minor and 
24 counts of child abuse, neglect or endangerment.

If convicted and sentenced to die, Stephens would be the only woman on death 
row in Nevada, Chief Deputy District Attorney Jacqueline Bluth has said.

The prosecutor said in March that a medical examiner had not determined 
Brandon’s cause of death because he had suffered from so many injuries, 
including burns, multiple bruises and scars, broken ribs, a lacerated liver, a 
broken collarbone and a collapsed lung.

Stephens told police that she was watching Brandon and his sister for 2 weeks 
while Brandon’s mother was living in a domestic violence shelter.

Stephens’ trial is set for Feb. 25, according to District Court records.

(source: Las Vegas Review-Journal)








CALIFORNIA:

Golden State Killer trial could put anti-death-penalty Newsom in hot water with 
voters



1 year ago Wednesday, a former policeman was arrested and accused of being the 
Golden State Killer who raped and murdered up and down California in the 1970s 
and ’80s.

If anyone deserves the death penalty, it’s the Golden State Killer — also known 
as the East Area Rapist, Visalia Ransacker, Creek Bed Killer or Original Night 
Stalker, depending on the community he terrorized.

He is suspected of raping more than 50 women and charged with 13 serial 
murders.

“He would break into people’s homes at night and have the wife tie the husband 
up,” Orange County Dist. Atty. Todd Spitzer says. “Then he would tie up the 
woman. He’d put saucers and cups on the husband’s back as an alarm system and 
tell him that if, while raping his wife, he heard the cups and saucers move, 
he’d kill them both.

“Then he’d rape the wife and kill them anyway. In some cases, their children 
were at home hiding in the closet.”

Two weeks ago, district attorneys from four counties — Orange, Ventura, Santa 
Barbara and Sacramento — voted unanimously to seek the death penalty if Joseph 
James DeAngelo Jr., 73, of suburban Sacramento is convicted of the murders.

DeAngelo also is charged with killing a Tulare County journalism professor. But 
prosecutors have not added any special circumstance counts needed for the death 
penalty. In addition, he faces kidnapping charges in several Contra Costa 
County rapes.

The suspect has not entered a plea.

Any death penalty verdict, however, would be moot while Gavin Newsom is 
governor. On March 13 — breaking a campaign promise to abide by the death 
penalty law — he declared a moratorium on executions in California during his 
tenure. He granted reprieves to all 737 condemned killers on San Quentin’s 
death row. They’ll stay locked up.

“The intentional killing of another person is wrong and as governor, I will not 
oversee the execution of any individual,” Newsom said. Capital punishment “has 
discriminated against defendants who are mentally ill, black and brown or can’t 
afford expensive legal representation.”

DeAngelo won’t be discriminated against because he’s black or brown. He’s 
white.

Newsom also talked to reporters about innocent people being executed. Perhaps 
so in other states. But no one has ever provided proof of an innocent person 
being executed in California, at least in modern times. Five have been 
exonerated on California’s death row, a sign of safeguards working.

A governor could simply spare the life of anyone he suspected of being 
innocent, although he’d need the state Supreme Court’s permission in the case 
of someone previously convicted of a felony.

It’s unlikely there’ll be much question about the guilt of the Golden State 
Killer, however, because of so many murders and DNA linking the victims and the 
suspect.

And if Newsom thought he was ridding himself of the death penalty issue for the 
duration of his governorship, he was badly mistaken. The Golden State Killer 
trial will be warming up about the time Newsom is running for reelection in 
2022 or eyeing the presidency soon after.

It’s one thing to make an academic case against capital punishment in the 
abstract. But when the sadistic details of the killings come pouring out, it 
could put Newsom in an uncomfortable spot.

There’ll be people like Ron Harrington of Newport Beach keeping the pressure on 
for what they regard as justice.

“It’s just a shock to the victims’ families that the governor has done what he 
has done,” he says.

Not all feel that way, of course. Some oppose capital punishment in all cases. 
But many feel like Harrington and are on a crusade about it.

The civil attorney’s younger brother, Keith Harrington, 24, was about to 
graduate from UC Irvine medical school. He and Patrice, 24, a pediatric trauma 
nurse, had been married only 3 months. They were living in his father’s beach 
house near Dana Point in August 1980 when the Golden State Killer slipped 
inside. He tied them up, raped Patrice and beat both to death with a sprinkler 
head.

Before leaving, the killer helped himself to the refrigerator, a common pattern 
in his murders.

“He literally pulverized Patti,” Harrington says. “Dad found them 2 days later. 
Dad was never the same.”

How’d the family handle it?

“Emotionally, it’s just something you park away and don’t really want to relive 
because every time you do it takes a toll,” he says. “Believe me, you 
compartmentalize it.”

One thing the family did — mainly another brother, Bruce, a developer — was 
sponsor a successful ballot initiative in 2004 that required anyone arrested or 
convicted of a felony to submit their DNA into a data bank. That has helped 
solved countless cold cases, Harrington says.

“He is the poster child for the death penalty,” Harrington says of the Golden 
State Killer. “I want to meet with the governor to discuss this. I want him to 
explain why we’re supposed to be lenient and compassionate with someone just so 
heinous.”

A spokesman for the governor told me “our office would certainly consider his 
request.”

California’s death penalty system is so dysfunctional that the Golden State 
Killer will probably die of old age in prison. There hasn’t been an execution 
since 2006 and only 13 since 1978. It’s a costly waste. Still voters have 
decided twice in recent years to keep it. Even expedite it.

(source: Los Angeles Times)

************************

Varying Poll Results on Death Penalty Leaves Unclear Picture



It was interesting to see opponents of the death penalty embrace the findings 
of a Pubic Policy Institute of California (PPIC) poll soon after Gov. Gavin 
Newsom announced a moratorium on the death penalty but remain relatively silent 
on the much narrower results from a subsequent Quinnipiac University poll on 
the same subject.

When PPIC announced that likely voters backed life without parole over the 
death penalty by 58% to 38%, headlines trumpeted that Gov. Newsom had his 
finger on the pulse of California political sentiment.

When a month later Quinnipiac found that life in prison with no chance of 
parole was chosen over the death penalty 48% to 41% the headlines, not so 
numerous, also argued that Californians were opposed to the death penalty, with 
a few reports noting the much narrower result compared to the PPIC poll. 
Quinnipiac stated there was a 4.1% margin of error in its poll, which could 
mean the views on the death penalty are about even.

Quinnipiac also showed a split opinion from voters on Newsom’s moratorium 
declaration. While 44% approved of the moratorium, 46% opposed.

Polling doesn’t always capture the true sentiment of voters when it comes to 
their final decision-making. PPIC also found wide favoritism to life in prison 
in 2012 prior to voters taking the opposite stand in backing the death penalty 
in elections that followed.

The poll reflected on the general concepts of the death penalty versus the idea 
of locking up murderers for the rest of their lives. However, stories of 
specific cases of brutal murder and torture could change the minds of voters 
that the worst of the killers deserve to die.

That approach is the goal of a group of family members of murder victims. They 
intend to visit all 80 Assembly and 40 Senate districts on a tour called 
“Victims of Murder Justice” to tell their horror stories about the torture and 
death of loved ones.

In addition, post-Newsom’s announcement and the poll releases, prosecutors 
announced they intended to seek the death penalty for the Golden State Killer 
for his murderous rampage. Seeking justice against Joseph DeAngelo, charged 
with the high profile murders, will keep the issue of the death penalty up 
front in voters’ minds.

Gavin Newsom sees himself as a pathfinder on many issues and will not back down 
from his death penalty position. But the people will have final say on the 
death penalty.

This death penalty debate could shake-up California elections in 2020 
especially if the proposed constitutional amendment to abolish the death 
penalty makes the ballot. My guess is that a number of Democrats don’t want to 
have to defend abolishing the death penalty and the two-thirds vote necessary 
may not be there to place the abolishment measure on the ballot.

(source: Joel Fox, Editor and Co-Publisher of Fox and Hounds Daily)








USA:

Trump Praises China for Killing Drug Traffickers----The president thinks 
executions will help stop the flow of "fentanol" into the United States.



Today Donald Trump praised China for classifying the export of fentanyl (or, as 
he calls it, "fentanol") as "a major crime," making traffickers subject to the 
death penalty. "In China, unlike in our country, the highest level of crime is 
very, very high," Trump said at the National Rx Drug Abuse & Heroin Summit in 
Atlanta. "You pay the ultimate price. So I appreciate that very much."

Contrary to what the president implied, U.S. law does authorize the execution 
of drug traffickers in certain circumstances. Drug offenders eligible for the 
death penalty include leaders of criminal enterprises that sell 60,000 
kilograms of marijuana, 60 kilograms of heroin, 17 kilograms of crack cocaine, 
or 600 grams of LSD.

That provision has been on the books since 1994, but it has never been carried 
out. It probably never will be, since it seems to be unconstitutional under a 
2008 decision in which the Supreme Court said the Eighth Amendment requires 
that the death penalty be reserved for "crimes that take the life of the 
victim." While deadly violence committed "in aid of racketeering activity" or 
"during and in relation to any…drug trafficking crime" would qualify for that 
description, nonviolent drug distribution seemingly would not.

Trump has suggested otherwise, arguing that "we have pushers and drugs dealers 
[who] are killing hundreds and hundreds of people" through overdoses. "If you 
shoot one person, they give you life, they give you the death penalty," he said 
at a March 2018 opioid summit. "These people can kill 2,000, 3,000 people, and 
nothing happens to them." He added that "some countries have a very, very tough 
penalty—the ultimate penalty—and by the way, they have much less of a drug 
problem than we do."

Trump made similar comments later that month, and his 1st attorney general, 
Jeff Sessions, urged federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for drug 
traffickers whenever feasible. Last December the president predicted that "the 
results will be incredible" if the Chinese government uses "the Death Penalty 
for distributors and pushers" of fentanyl. So Trump's thirst for drug 
traffickers' blood is well-established, and so is his admiration for 
authoritarian governments that dare to draw it on a regular basis.

A 2015 report from Harm Reduction International identified 33 countries that 
authorize the death penalty for drug offenses. But it classified just 7—China, 
Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Indonesia—as "high 
application states," meaning "the sentencing of people convicted of drug 
offences to death and/or carrying out executions are a routine and mainstreamed 
part of the criminal justice system." 3 of those countries—China, Iran, and 
Saudi Arabia—account for almost all known executions of drug offenders: 546 out 
of 549 in 2013. Those are the examples Trump wants us to follow.

(source: reason.com)

*********************

Death Penalty Conclusion: Capital Punishment Is Irrational



In this series debunking the reasons to support the death penalty, we’ve looked 
at:

Part 1: Redemption

Part 2: Deterrence

Part 3: Cost

Part 4: Humane killing?

Part 5: Closure

We know that the death penalty is ineffective as a deterrent. We know that 
capital punishment costs significantly more than life in prison, drawing funds 
from law enforcement and victims services. We know that there is no way to 
humanely kill a person who does not want to die. We also know it doesn’t bring 
closure and there is evidence that even some of the most hardened killers have 
been rehabilitated enough that their lives behind bars add value to the world. 
It can bring suffering to innocent parties in the form of trauma, depression, 
anxiety and suicidal thoughts in corrections officers, wardens, journalists 
covering the cases and in the loved ones of the offender. In my previous series 
about wrongful convictions, we also learned that innocent men and women have 
likely been executed for crimes they did not commit.

What we haven’t covered is the notion of vengeance. In 2015, it feels wrong, 
barbaric and backwards to have to cover it, but just a few days ago, someone on 
Twitter asserted that it’s the best reason to support the death penalty. Even 
in spite of all its other shortcomings.

I can understand supporting the death penalty if you mistakenly thought it was 
cheaper, or if you truly believed it would bring comfort and solace to a murder 
victim’s family. I could understand supporting the death penalty because you 
firmly believe it deters enough people from killing to justify taking a life. I 
could understand all of these reasons, though I would disagree with you. The 
one reason I cannot understand is vengeance.

If your sole reason for supporting the death penalty is to satiate your own 
anger, then you have no right to call yourself a rational person.

Is it rational to value an emotional response over the facts? Is it rational to 
victimize a second innocent family? Is it rational to force hardworking men and 
women into a position where they must take a life? A position that will likely 
result in post-traumatic stress? Is it rational to spend so much money on this 
emotional response that the funding for victim’s services, education, police, 
fire, ambulance and health care is depleted? Is it rational to lead a murder 
victim’s family to believe this solution will make them feel better when in 
reality, it does no such thing?

The answer is no. It’s not rational. It’s emotional, and while I can hardly 
blame the family or loved ones of a murder victim for responding emotionally, 
the law should not. The law should always be based on rational, evidence-based 
reasoning. This is why secularists exist. This is why the separation of church 
and state is such a valuable idea. We want our laws to reflect reality. We want 
our laws to prevent more people from becoming the victims of crime, and if the 
law can’t do that, at the very least, it should not be creating more victims 
unnecessarily. I think that is the very least we should be expecting from the 
law.

My biggest problem with supporters of the death penalty and most of the law 
that exists today is that they’re reactive when they should be proactive. 
Instead of waiting for someone to get killed and then reacting, we should 
proactively be working towards serious measures that will prevent murders from 
taking place in the first place. Measures such as a more effective and valued 
mental health system. There should be more power and jurisdiction given to 
child protective services and domestic violence prevention. Children who are 
observed acting like bullies or being bullied themselves at school should be 
given access to programs that will engage their mind in a positive way, and to 
counsellors who don’t just go through the motions to fulfil their job 
description. More money should be spent on education and teachers should be 
trained in conflict resolution, and how to actually engage young minds rather 
than just lecture them from the front of the room. More after-school programs 
suited to at-risk youth should be implemented. Prison sentences for nonviolent, 
victimless drug crimes should be completely eliminated as sending a teenager or 
young adult to prison will only work to harden them. Post-secondary education 
should be free and easily accessed by all, like many European countries. 
Veterans returning from war should be fully supported on the state’s dime and 
given plenty of access to mental health services, rehabilitation programs and 
medical assistance. Signs of an unhealthy mind should be taught to everyone, 
who then have the opportunity to seek real and effective help for their family 
and loved ones who may be at risk of offending before they actually hurt 
anyone. Finally, people who have been diagnosed as mentally ill with an 
affliction known to cause violence, should not have sole custody of children 
until they seek help and stick with it. People with a history of violent 
offences should not have custody of children. Parents involved in repeated 
domestic abuse reports should not have custody of children. Addicts should not 
have custody of children until they are sober.

Whenever I suggest these things, someone inevitably pipes up with, “but, 
Godless Mom, people can still slip through the system unnoticed and end up 
killing. It won’t stop all killers!”, and that’s correct. These measures won’t 
stop all killers. However, they will stop some, if not a majority, and that’s a 
whole lot better than waiting around for murder to happen so we can react.

Besides, these are just my ideas. I am sure there are plenty more preventative 
measures we can take that I have not thought of.

Now that you’ve read my entire series on the death penalty, do you still 
support it? Can you tell me why or why not in the comments? Have you thought of 
ways to prevent violent crime? Did any of you change your opinion in the course 
of reading these two series? Let me know!

In closing, I am going to list for you a series of documentaries that you 
should watch. If you have found my posts on this topic interesting, whether you 
are for or against the death penalty, these documentaries will interest you.

Into the Abyss, an objective look at the death penalty in Texas. This is one of 
the best films you will ever see in your life:

After Innocence follows men exonerated from death row as they try to get back 
to normal life:

At The Death House Door, a documentary about the chaplain on death row in 
Huntsville, Texas. This film will give you a better understanding of the effect 
the death penalty has on correctional staff. It will also shake you to your 
core.

If you want to work towards ending the death penalty, please consider 
supporting the following organizations:

Death Penalty Information Center

ACLU

Equal Justice USA

Journey of Hope – An organization of murder victims families against the death 
penalty.

Murder Victims Families For Human Rights

Sister Helen Prejean

National Coalition to Abolish The Death Penalty

People of Faith Against the Death Penalty

Project Hope to Abolish The Death Penalty

Students Against The Death Penalty

The Innocence Project

(source: patheos.com)

*********************

Death penalty with dignity? Supreme Court reopens debate.



The new Supreme Court appears a staunch defender of capital punishment, leading 
scholars to reexamine the balance between the dictates of justice – swift 
punishment – with the rights of prisoners to live, and die, with dignity.

When Fleet Maull was serving his 14-year sentence in a maximum-security prison 
more than three decades ago, he spent a lot of time with men who were seriously 
ill or dying.

The path that led him there was “a little weird,” he says. In the 1970s, he was 
a “countercultural expat” and a highly educated psychotherapist traveling the 
world, stopping to study Buddhism with Tibetan masters. To fuel his peripatetic 
lifestyle, he was a low-level drug peddler smuggling cocaine.

“Which shows you what a knucklehead I was,” says Dr. Maull, who was caught and 
convicted in 1985 and given the mandatory minimum sentence that altered his 
life.

Today, nearly 20 years after his release, he calls the timing of his conviction 
“auspicious” and says, without irony, that “I was in the right place at the 
right time.” His imprisonment set him on the difficult path to discover what 
has become his life’s purpose: to help prisoners “live and die with dignity and 
humanity and with as little pain as possible.”

This aim to uphold the humanity and minimize the pain of those who have 
committed heinous acts is not a natural impulse for most people. But as a 
Buddhist spiritual adviser and a prisoners’ rights activist who founded the 
National Prison Hospice Association while serving his sentence, Dr. Maull sees 
this goal as springing from an important principle. It's rooted not only in the 
teachings of the world’s major religions, but also woven into the political 
ideals of Enlightenment liberalism, in which prohibitions against “cruel and 
unusual” punishment began to evolve over the past few centuries. Is America’s 
media divide destroying democracy?

This year, as a newly constituted Supreme Court has begun to readdress capital 
punishment, the tension between the principle of human dignity and the 
practical needs of justice has come into focus in a way the United States has 
not seen for decades, experts say. In fact, the court’s newest conservative 
justices are poised to make it the most supportive of state executions in 
decades.

“Capital punishment cases have come out of the woodwork in a way that I hadn’t 
really been anticipating, in part because it’s been kind of a dormant issue for 
a while,” says Kathryn Heard, a legal scholar at Dickinson College in Carlisle, 
Pennsylvania.

Reexamining principles In many cases, the Supreme Court’s recent rulings have 
alarmed both liberals and conservatives, who say decisions on the religious 
freedom of those on death row, as well as the extent of the Constitution’s 
prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment, have been chipping away at 
modern concepts of dignity.

Led by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the 5 conservative justices have expressed a new 
impatience at the constant stays and decadeslong litigation that characterize a 
lot of capital cases. They have suggested that most death row appeals are 
simply “pleading games” made in bad faith, thwarting the demands of justice.

In 2 cases decided this April, Justice Gorsuch, writing for a 5-4 majority each 
time, rejected the appeals of two men, one in Missouri and one in Alabama, who 
argued that the lethal injection protocols of these states would cause them an 
unusual amount of pain, given their individual conditions.

“Courts should police carefully against attempts to use such challenges as 
tools to interpose unjustified delay,” Justice Gorsuch wrote in the case that 
dismissed the claims of the Missouri inmate, who argued that, because of his 
rare medical condition, the state’s lethal injection protocol could cause him 
to die in excruciating pain.

Aside from technical issues of Constitutional jurisprudence, Dr. Maull and 
others have posed difficult, if fundamental, questions.

Is there a limit to the kind of pain prisoners being executed should 
experience, even assuming that it will not be pain-free? At the time of 
execution, should prisoners have a right to have a religious cleric of their 
own faith or denomination at their side?

“We just see some really strong crosswinds on these cases right now,” says 
Corinna Lain, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law in 
Virginia. “So I think this is a question we have to be asking now, because what 
principles are behind the death penalty right now? It’s really not about 
deterrence anymore,” she says. “As it’s been shown again and again, it doesn’t 
exist. It’s not about the incapacitation of dangerous people. It’s all 
retributivism. That’s it.”

“So why should we care?” Professor Lain continues. “Why should we care about 
how they’re housed? Why should we care about the method of their executions, 
given the way they treated their victims? And why should we care whether they 
have a person comforting them when the state puts them to death?”

‘Inspired to serve’

Looking back over his experience in prison, Dr. Maull says it was strange that 
federal officials sent him to the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in 
Springfield, Missouri, rather than a medium-security penitentiary. Dr. Maull 
found himself among the cadres of healthy prisoners who were needed to help run 
the maximum-security hospital just as dozens of prisoners with AIDS were being 
transferred there from around the country.

“When I got there, I realized I was in this hell realm,” says Dr. Maull. “I 
found myself in this world of tremendous suffering, deep suffering, even 
without the AIDS crisis.”

Suddenly, after being immersed in the meditative practices of Buddhism for 10 
years, the convicted drug-runner found himself bathing prisoners with 
disabilities, assisting peers with mental illnesses, and teaching mindfulness 
to blind inmates or those dealing with extreme pain.

“I was just inspired to serve,” says Dr. Maull, who embraced the work of making 
things better for dying men confined in maximum security. Rebalancing religious 
freedoms

Earlier this year, the high court denied the appeal of a Muslim death row 
inmate in Alabama who wanted his imam at his side at the moment of his death. 
Prison policy would allow only a Christian chaplain at his side. Many religious 
conservatives decried the decision.

“The state’s obligation is to protect and facilitate the free exercise of a 
person’s faith, not to seek reasons to deny him consolation at the moment of 
his death,” wrote the conservative social critic David French in the National 
Review.

Just a few weeks later, the court stayed the execution of a Buddhist inmate in 
Texas, even though the facts of his case were nearly exactly the same, experts 
say.

“What the State may not do, in my view, is allow Christian or Muslim inmates 
but not Buddhist inmates to have a religious adviser of their religion in the 
execution room,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh in a 7-2 decision that left many 
court observers puzzled. After the decision, Texas banned all religious 
chaplains and advisers from the death chamber during an execution.

Which makes sense, says Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal 
Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, California, and a strong advocate of 
the death penalty for those who commit horrible crimes.

“Certainly a person who is about to be executed should be allowed to consult 
with his adviser, and for many religions, confession at the end is considered 
very important, and that should all be accommodated,” says Mr. Scheidegger, who 
has written more than 150 briefs for the Supreme Court advocating for the 
rights of victims. “But actually having a spiritual adviser in the execution 
room is not necessary, and if it can’t be done as a practical matter for all 
religions, then it should be done for none of them.”

“But of course we should avoid making an execution undignified, or an 
unnecessarily painful event, to the extent we can as a practical matter,” he 
says. “The penalty of death is just the penalty of death, and we shouldn’t be 
heaping additional things on it, and I don’t think anybody today thinks we 
should.”

What is ‘cruel and unusual?

The Supreme Court’s new conservative majority, however, appears to be embracing 
a different understanding of what constitutes an “unusual” amount of pain 
during an execution, scholars say.

In previous cases, the Supreme Court has done away with certain methods of 
execution that violate “evolving standards of decency,” ruling that states 
should employ less painful methods at their disposal.

In his majority decision denying the Missouri man’s appeal, however, Justice 
Gorsuch wrote that the Constitution does not guarantee a painless death and 
that “the question in dispute is whether the State’s chosen method of execution 
cruelly superadds pain to the death sentence.”

In previous opinions, only the late Justice Antonin Scalia and Justice Clarence 
Thomas advocated this position. In their view, the Constitution sets a high 
bar, only prohibiting states from “superadding” extra “terror, pain, or 
disgrace.”

But the principles behind evolving standards of decency are woven into the very 
origins of the secular, liberal state, says Professor Heard at Dickinson 
College, who traces the evolution of the prohibition of cruel and unusual 
punishment to the Enlightenment.

As an emerging middle class began to challenge the hierarchy of kings and 
lords, philosophers began to insist on an individual’s “inalienable rights,” 
including freedom from cruel and unusual punishment, she says.

“Public displays of both state-sponsored violence and established religious 
belief delegitimized a state’s claims to securing the rights, freedoms, and 
liberties of all individuals,” says Professor Heard.

This shift in thought is in many ways fundamental to the evolving standards of 
decency that have governed the implementation of the death penalty since then. 
Once-common punishments, including the execution of people committing nonlethal 
crimes or the execution of minors or the mentally disabled, are now widely 
considered cruel and unusual.

“So what does that mean for us as a society?” says Robin Konrad, an assistant 
professor at Howard University School of Law in Washington and a critic of the 
Supreme Court’s recent capital cases. “I mean, really, the issues surrounding 
the death penalty are, in general, about this as much as anything: What is our 
sense of humanity, and how do we want to carry out our punishments? And if we 
are going to have a death penalty, how do we want to carry it out, and are we 
OK with saying, well, it’s OK if we torture people to death?”

Common humanity

In the Alabama case in which the inmate said the lethal injection would cause 
him an unusual amount of pain, state Attorney General Steve Marshall echoed 
many of the concerns of the Supreme Court’s majority, saying the family of the 
death row inmate’s victim were “revictimized” and “deprived of justice.” The 
inmate had “dodged his death sentence for the better part of 3 decades ... by 
desperately clinging to legal maneuverings to avoid facing the consequences of 
his heinous crime,” Attorney General Marshall said.

“A lot of inmates will drag everything out as long as they can, and there are 
plenty of judges willing to accommodate them,” says Mr. Scheidegger at the 
Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. “But I think it’s possible now that we can 
make some progress on these kinds of delays.”

Legal matters aside, for Dr. Maull, helping prisoners live and die with dignity 
and humanity and with as little pain as possible is an expression of compassion 
that asserts our common humanity.

Politics with respect

“I don’t think any of us can imagine what it’s like to face death in prison,” 
he says. “These prisoners are often dying apart from their families, 
unwitnessed, and with just about the least dignity a human being can die with.”

“So we try to bring as much dignity to their journey and to their deaths as we 
possibly can.”

(source: Christian Science Monitor)

************************

Why the Death Penalty Has Lost Support From Both Parties



20 years ago, most politicians in both parties supported the death penalty. But 
today, opposition to it has become increasingly bipartisan.

Democrats have always been more wary, but now more conservatives have also 
become convinced that capital punishment is another failed government program. 
In part, that’s because the legal process for such cases is enormously 
expensive, even though few executions are ever carried out.

“When you look at how much money we’re spending, no one looks at that and 
thinks the death penalty works fine,” says Hannah Cox, national manager for 
Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, a pro-abolition group. “We’re 
seeing a real escalation as far as the number of Republican legislators who are 
sponsoring repeal bills.”

There’s evidence of declining political support for capital punishment all 
around the country.

Last month, California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on 
executions. In October, the Washington state Supreme Court struck down the 
death penalty, finding it arbitrary and racially biased. In February, Wyoming’s 
GOP-controlled House passed an abolition bill, although it failed in the 
Senate.

“This is far too much authority to rest in government,” GOP state Sen. Brian 
Boner said during floor debate over the Wyoming bill. “Sometimes we wonder if 
our government can deliver the mail correctly.”

Lately, the spotlight has shifted to New Hampshire, where last week the 
legislature sent the governor a bill to repeal the death penalty. Both chambers 
passed the bill by veto-proof margins, with bipartisan support. Once the 
legislature overrides GOP Gov. Chris Sununu’s expected veto, New Hampshire will 
be the 21st state to outlaw capital punishment. Colorado and Nevada could be 
next — both have repeal bills currently pending.

For the first time since the death penalty was put back into practice during 
the 1970s, a majority of Americans now live in states that have abolished the 
practice or imposed a moratorium on it, according to the Death Penalty 
Information Center, which researches the issue.

Still, support for capital punishment has not vanished. Polls show that a 
majority of Americans continue to back it.

President Trump has called for executing drug dealers as part of his plan to 
address the opioid epidemic. And last week, the U.S. Supreme Court — where a 
majority of justices have repeatedly vented frustration with delays in 
executions — ruled that Alabama can carry one out despite concerns that the 
state’s method of lethal injection could cause excruciating pain.

But the number of executions has come down fast from its peak 20 years ago. The 
number of death sentences being imposed has also dropped dramatically.

“The successful abolition efforts have been bipartisan,” says Robert Dunham, 
executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “Democrats are more 
likely to support repeal than Republicans, but we’re getting to the point where 
more and more Republican legislators are introducing bills to abolish the death 
penalty and signing onto bills in states where the repeal effort is 
bipartisan.”

Responding to Crime Rates

Back in 1992, while running for president, Democratic Gov. Bill Clinton flew 
back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a man so 
badly brain-damaged that he said he was saving part of his last meal “for 
later.”

“Democrats were still supportive of the death penalty,” says Douglas Berman, a 
law professor at Ohio State University. “They certainly believed it would be a 
political killer not to be vocal in saying that, at least in some cases, the 
death penalty would be appropriate.”

Violent crime rates peaked in the early 1990s, and the tough-on-crime response 
embraced by Democrats and Republicans at the time culminated in the 1994 
federal crime law, which made dozens of additional federal crimes punishable by 
death.

But by the time the bill had passed, crime rates were already beginning to 
fall. According to the FBI, violent crime rates plummeted by 49 percent between 
1993 and 2017. Property crime rates dropped even more.

The steep national decline in violent crime and murders over the past 
generation has made it possible for politicians to do something other than seek 
the maximum possible sentence at every turn. As with the broader criminal 
justice reform effort, reexamining the ultimate punishment has become a 
bipartisan project.

“There’s a natural alliance with Democrats,” says Cox of Conservatives 
Concerned About the Death Penalty. “There are not a lot of issues where the two 
sides are coming together.”

Concerns About Cost and Innocence

Appeals are filed as a matter of course in capital cases. Relatively few of 
them result in sentences of death. Among those convicted, DNA evidence has been 
used to exonerate more than 160 death row prisoners. One prisoner is now 
exonerated for every nine executions that are carried out.

“It’s well-known that it’s more expensive to put people to death than to keep 
them in prison for the rest of their lives,” says Daniel LaChance, an Emory 
University historian who studies the issue. “It all adds up to a really 
expensive big-government program. There has been a sense, particularly in 
places that use the death penalty infrequently but have big death rows, of what 
is this all for?”

California has the largest death row in the nation, with more than 700 
prisoners, but the state hasn’t executed anyone since 2006. New Hampshire 
hasn’t carried out an execution since 1939. In Wyoming, it’s been more than 25 
years.

“If you have a sentence on the books, you want it used, and it’s not being 
used,” says Brandon Garrett, a law professor at Duke University. “The only 
point of the death penalty is to execute people quickly or it does seem 
arbitrary.”

Supreme Court justices and politicians sometimes express frustration and even 
anger about the long delays involved with executions — the endless rounds of 
appeals, the legal challenges that have blocked execution methods.

“We need to accelerate the process as much as we can,” Mississippi GOP state 
Rep. Mark Baker, who is running for state attorney general, told the Clarion 
Ledger recently. “Stories abound of inmates on death row and they’re just not 
moving.”

But a growing number of politicians wonder whether preserving the death penalty 
is worth the cost.

“When you talk about death penalty, a lot of people immediately want to have a 
criminal justice angle on it or a morality angle,” Chad McCoy, the Kentucky 
House Republican whip and sponsor of an abolition bill, told The Hill. “Mine is 
purely economics.”

Fewer Prosecutors Seek Death Sentences

It’s not only lawmakers who have grown more skeptical about capital punishment. 
Prosecutors have, too.

In part due to the costs associated with capital cases, the death penalty has 
essentially disappeared from rural counties, says Garrett, author of End of Its 
Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice. Fewer than 2 
percent of the counties in the nation are responsible for half the death row 
convictions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Not long ago, jurisdictions like Philadelphia County, Los Angeles County and 
Harris County, which includes Houston, were imposing 10 or more death sentences 
apiece per year. If Harris County were a country, it would have spent years 
ranked among the world’s top 10 for death sentences.

But there’s been a changing of the guard in many large counties over the past 
two or three years, including Harris and Philadelphia. Voters are electing 
reform-minded prosecutors who are less likely — or completely unwilling — to 
seek execution as a punishment. Last year, no county in the United States 
imposed more than two death sentences.

During the mid-1990s, there were more than 300 death sentences imposed annually 
for 3 years running. Last year, the total was 42. There hasn’t been more than 
100 since 2010.

“There have been zero defendants sentenced to the death penalty in cases 
prosecuted by this administration,” says Dane Schiller, spokesman for Harris 
County District Attorney Kim Ogg, who was elected in 2016. (One defendant 
received the death penalty in a case handled by an independent prosecutor due 
to a conflict of interest in the DA’s office.) “Three Harris County inmates 
have been executed, in decades-old cases, since we took office.”

Last year, 8 states executed a total of 25 prisoners — down from a peak of 98 
in 1999. So far this year, 3 prisoners have been put to death: 2 in Texas and 1 
in Alabama.

Not only is the death penalty only being used in a limited number of places, 
it’s also declining in those places.

Texas and Florida used to impose more than 40 death sentences per year — now 
the number is less than 10. Georgia, another leading death penalty state in 
recent years, hasn’t imposed a death sentence since 2014. Virginia hasn’t 
sentenced anyone to death row for nearly 8 years.

During the George W. Bush administration, the federal Justice Department 
actively sought to pursue capital cases in states where the death penalty was 
moribund. That’s not happening under Trump, even though he was elected on a 
pro-death penalty platform in 2016.

“His Justice Department has done nothing, to my knowledge, to speed up 
executions at the federal level or help at the state level with speeding up 
capital systems or executions,” says Berman, the Ohio State law professor.

In 2016, the same year Trump was elected, Nebraska voters overturned a death 
penalty repeal that had been passed by the legislature, while California voters 
rejected a ballot measure to end capital punishment. But if 2016 seemed to 
signal a shift back in favor of capital punishment, the momentum hasn’t been 
sustained.

Under Trump, just 3 federal prisoners have been sentenced to die. In last 
year’s elections, 2 governors who imposed moratoriums on the death penalty — 
Democrats Kate Brown of Oregon and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania — both won 
reelection.

Conversely, 2 governors who vetoed abolition bills — Republicans Pete Ricketts 
of Nebraska and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire — also won reelection. (Sununu 
vetoed an abolition bill last fall, when both chambers were still controlled by 
Republicans, and legislators failed to override him.)

“No one’s yet to see any significant backlash on either side for being either 
abolitionist or disinclined to support the death penalty,” Berman says.

Mile Wide and an Inch Deep?

Last year, Gallup found that 56 % of Americans support the death penalty. That 
was a point higher than in 2017 but still below the level of 60 % or higher 
that Gallup found every other year dating back to 1976 — including 80 % support 
in 1994, the year of the federal crime law.

Support for capital punishment has weakened, among both juries and the public 
at large, due to the spread of the sentence of life without the possibility of 
parole.

“In a place like Texas, a big part of the story is life without parole, which 
they didn’t have until 2005,” says LaChance, the Emory historian, and author of 
Executing Freedom: The Cultural Life of Capital Punishment in the United 
States. “For so long, juries were voting for death because they didn’t trust 
the system, they didn’t want revolving-door justice.”

Death penalty opponents like to say that support for executions is a mile wide 
but an inch deep. A majority of people will reflexively say they’re in favor of 
it but will support alternatives like life without parole, if given a choice, 
or be troubled by the number of exonerated death row prisoners.

If crime rates increase, support for the death penalty could make a comeback. 
And many politicians and prosecutors want to keep execution available for 
punishing the “worst of the worst.” In Florida, for example, prosecutors are 
seeking the death penalty for the alleged shooter in last year’s Parkland high 
school massacre.

Death penalty experts agree that the practice will not be completely abolished 
anytime in the foreseeable future. But both the use of the death penalty and 
political support for it has declined markedly since the 1990s, when it was a 
wedge issue that moved many voters. The list of states abolishing the death 
penalty continues to grow.

“I see the death penalty ending with a whimper, not a bang,” Garrett says. “It 
may be that the best thing is to allow states and communities to decide what’s 
best for them.”

(source: witnessla.com)

***********************

21,000 Years Lost and Counting: Prosecutors Are Working to Clear Wrongful 
Convictions, but Their Record Is Mixed



Before the charges against him were finally dismissed, Richard Phillips spent 
more than 45 years in prison for a crime he did not commit, earning him the 
dubious distinction of having been locked up longer than any other exoneree to 
date. He is one of 2,425 wrongfully convicted individuals exonerated since 
1989, who have collectively spent more than 21,000 years behind bars.

Phillips was 1 of the 151 individuals exonerated in 2018 alone, according to a 
new report from the National Registry of Exonerations, a compendium of wrongful 
convictions cases. His release and eventual exoneration were facilitated by 
what the report calls “professional exonerators” — innocence organizations, 
independent or law school-affiliated nongovernmental groups, and conviction 
integrity units housed within prosecutors’ offices — whose influence in 
righting wrongful convictions is growing. In 2018, they were responsible for 
2/3 of the exonerations reported by the registry; in nearly half of those 
cases, the innocence organization and CIU worked together to clear the 
wrongfully convicted, including in the case of Richard Phillips.

In March 1972, nearly 9 months after 21-year-old Gregory Harris left his 
Detroit, Michigan, home to buy a pack of cigarettes, his body was found by the 
roadside some 24 miles north in the city of Troy. He’d been shot in the head. 2 
weeks later, Harris’s brother-in-law Fred Mitchell was arrested for an 
unrelated armed robbery and carrying a concealed weapon. And he had a story to 
tell.

It was an elaborate one, about how he’d already told police — back in the 
summer of 1971, after he’d been popped for carrying a .22 pistol — that two men 
he knew, Richard Phillips and Richard Palombo, had pulled him unwittingly into 
a plot to kill Harris as part of a mob-related beef. While there was no record 
of Mitchell having previously told the cops this story, based solely on his 
account of the crime, Phillips and Palombo were charged with 1st-degree murder. 
Indeed, when they were tried just months later, the only physical evidence the 
state had was a ballistics match between the .22 Mitchell was caught with the 
year before and 2 bullets recovered from Harris’s body.

Mitchell denied that he’d been given a deal on his armed robbery charge in 
exchange for his testimony, but lawyers for Phillips and Palombo made some 
headway during cross-examination, drawing out inconsistencies in the various 
stories Mitchell told police. Palombo’s parents testified that no one in the 
family was connected to the mob, as Mitchell had alleged. Still, Phillips and 
Palombo were found guilty and each was sentenced to life without parole.

After several appellate twists and turns — including the revelation that 
Mitchell had been given a deal in exchange for his testimony after all, 
information the state should have disclosed — Palombo finally admitted in the 
summer of 2010 that he and Mitchell were responsible for Harris’s death; 
Mitchell was mad at Harris because he’d allegedly stolen $500 from Mitchell’s 
mother. When asked about Phillips’s involvement, Palombo said that at the time 
of the murder, he didn’t even know Phillips. “And as far as I know, he had 
nothing to do with anything,” Palombo said, according to the registry.

Eventually, the University of Michigan Law School’s innocence clinic was tipped 
off to Palombo’s confession and got involved in Phillips’s case. (The UM and 
Michigan State University law schools, along with the University of California, 
Irvine’s Newkirk Center, are partners in the registry.) In December 2017, 
Phillips was finally released on bond. In January 2018, Wayne County Prosecutor 
Kym Worthy formed a conviction integrity unit, and it too took up Phillips’s 
case. The unit found additional problems and within months formally dismissed 
the case against him.

In announcing Phillips’s exoneration, Worthy did what few prosecutors have done 
so plainly: She apologized. “The system failed him,” she said. “Nothing that I 
can say will bring back years of his life spent in prison. Justice is truly 
being served today.”

A Growing Trend

It was a watershed moment for the Wayne County CIU; Phillips was their 1st 
exoneration, but in just over a year of operation, the office, led by a veteran 
state appellate defender, has already cleared 5 more wrongful convictions — 4 
murders and a child sex abuse case.

(Overall, 101 of the 151 exonerations last year involved violent crimes; 46 % 
were homicide cases. And this number could still grow; because of the 
complexity of tracking cases of wrongful conviction, the registry typically has 
to revise its year-end numbers as it learns of additional exonerations it 
initially missed.)

The Wayne County unit is part of a national trend highlighted by the registry. 
Not only has the number of conviction integrity units steadily increased since 
the first were formed in 2002 — there are now 45 across the country, with 8 new 
units coming online in 2018 alone — but they also are increasingly working in 
concert with innocence organizations.

Illinois’s Cook County CIU, working with the University of Chicago School of 
Law, accounted for 31 exonerations last year, all of which were tied to the 
bribery and protection scheme run by Chicago Police Sgt. Ronald Watts and his 
officers — the subject of The Intercept’s “Code of Silence” series. (To date, 
more than 60 cases related to the scandal have been dismissed, according to the 
registry.)

The report notes that while the Chicago exonerations arose out of a single, 
far-reaching scandal (similar to a spate of dismissals in Houston tied to a 
problem at the crime lab), the Wayne County CIU has undertaken investigations 
into cases that weren’t exactly low-hanging fruit; they have not relied on DNA 
evidence, and they spanned from 1971 to 2006, making them the kind of cases 
that the report says require a commitment of “extraordinary resources.”

By the time Valerie Newman was hired to run the nascent Detroit CIU, she 
already had a reputation as a fierce advocate with a talent for freeing the 
innocent. She’d spent more than 20 years as a Michigan public appellate 
defender and had clashed with Wayne County prosecutors on more than one 
occasion. And while she says she can’t speak for Worthy, Newman knows it was 
her reputation that put her on the radar as a contender to head up the CIU. 
“From what I’ve heard her say before, that’s one of the reasons why she wanted 
someone like me, because she knows that I have integrity,” Newman said. “I’m 
someone who knows what I’m doing and can be trusted to do a good job.”

Key to the Detroit unit’s success, Newman says, are the DA’s support and the 
unit’s independence within the office. She and Worthy worked hard to come up 
with protocols for how the unit would work, Newman says, and in addition to her 
boss, the Detroit Police Department and other law enforcement organizations, as 
well as the local court system, have been supportive of the CIU’s work.

The office has 2 part-time attorneys and two full-time attorneys, including 
Newman, with another coming on board soon. There is also a full-time detective 
— a veteran of the Detroit Police Department — and a full-time support person. 
It’s robust staffing for such a young unit, and Newman says that was also 
Worthy’s doing. “She wanted sufficient funding so that … the unit could operate 
in good faith and do its work.”

Newman was the CIU’s lead attorney on the Phillips case, which had already made 
local headlines after a judge agreed with the University of Michigan’s 
Innocence Clinic in late 2017 that Phillips should be granted a new trial. 
Newman reached out to David Moran, who leads the university’s clinic, to say 
that the unit was going to do its own investigation. Ultimately, Newman’s 
office found additional evidence to back up what Moran’s team had already 
found, and several months later, Worthy announced that the case would be 
dismissed once and for all.

Moran said that to him, the fact that the CIU turned up additional evidence of 
Phillips’s innocence “was a very good sign” that the unit and the DA’s office 
as a whole was actually committed to this work. “There’ve been many conviction 
integrity units opened around the country, and not all of them have been very 
good. Some of them, I think, can be pretty safely called window dressing,” he 
said. “Just putting up a shingle somewhere in the prosecutor’s office and 
saying we have a conviction integrity unit doesn’t really do it.”

A Mixed Record

Where Wayne County had tremendous success in its 1st year — and is on track to 
surpass that 1st-year total — the registry report describes a number of CIUs 
that have been in operation for at least 5 years and have yet to produce a 
single exoneration. (The district attorney’s office in California’s San 
Bernardino County even refused to publicly divulge any information about its 
unit.) “A dearth of exonerations could in theory be evidence of a highly 
accurate adjudication process stretching back 20 or 30 years that produced few 
false convictions,” the report reads, “but that is deeply implausible.”

Instead, the report argues that the structure of a CIU has a direct correlation 
to its success, including whether the unit has at least one full-time attorney 
assigned to it. Of 14 units formed prior to 2018 that lack a full-time 
attorney, just six have reported an exoneration; 19 of the 22 CIUs founded 
before 2018 that have a full-time attorney have been involved in at least 1 
exoneration.

In a 2016 paper on the rise of conviction review units, John Hollway, a dean at 
the University of Pennsylvania Law School and executive director of the 
school’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice, cited proper 
staffing as an important factor in helping to create independent, flexible, and 
transparent units. Among other things, an effective unit should accept all 
cases with a plausible or “colorable” claim of innocence (which would include 
convictions arising from plea bargains) and encourage the open exchange of 
information and ideas with the individual seeking review.

Those best practices remain true today, Hollway told The Intercept. “I still 
think that the ingredients we talked about in our report are the ingredients of 
a unit that operates with credibility,” he said. “And if you are really doing 
the work in good faith and honestly and in the right way, I think you’ll start 
to see an office like Detroit’s improve the legitimacy of everything that that 
DA’s office does.”

He believes that is in part why we see the CIU trend growing as more district 
attorney candidates run on reform-minded agendas. “There are a few things you 
can do that will send a public message that communicates the right philosophy 
of how justice is going to be done by the chief law enforcement officer of the 
jurisdiction,” he said. “A conviction integrity unit run properly is a big, 
public, easy-to-identify way of saying, ‘We’re humble; we strive for 
perfection, but we’re human. Our obligation to our community is to own up to 
that and make it right and learn from it.’ And where I still think there’s room 
for growth in the conviction integrity realm is the ‘and learn from it’ part.”

That’s exactly what Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner — and the 
Philly Police Department, courts, and public defender’s office — have been 
trying to do, with a little help from Hollway and the Quattrone Center.

Preventing Wrongful Convictions

On the evening of April 13, 2011, at about 8:30 p.m., Talena Johnson and her 
nephew Nafis Murray were talking on a corner in northwest Philadelphia when a 
man in a gray hoodie came around the corner and started shooting. Johnson fled; 
she was shot in the back but survived. Murray was dead at the scene. Later, 
Johnson told police that she’d seen the muzzle flash and recognized the shooter 
as George Cortez. A surveillance video recorded the shooter, who police also 
believed looked like Cortez. He was arrested and charged with murder and 
attempted murder.

But Cortez had an alibi. He had a time-stamped receipt from a bakery where he’d 
picked up a cake for his son. He also had a cellphone video of his son at home 
licking frosting off that cake. And, at 8 p.m., Cortez had driven across town 
to pick his wife up from work; there was video of that too — though police 
couldn’t make out the image of the driver.

Cortez’s cellphone video turned out to be a pivotal piece of evidence. At 
trial, Cortez’s attorneys couldn’t figure out how to get the video off the 
phone to be projected for the jury, so the prosecutor asked a Philadelphia 
detective to extract it; in doing so, he concluded that the date and time stamp 
on the video had been altered, leading the state to believe that Cortez had 
recorded the video after the fact to bolster his alibi.

That was wrong — the phone had a glitch that impacted the way video files were 
stamped — and so was Johnson’s eyewitness ID. As it happened, another witness 
had come forward just days after the crime to say he believed that the shooter 
was actually Cortez’s brother, Owen.

The Philadelphia district attorney’s conviction review unit agreed the case was 
flawed; in April 2016, Cortez was exonerated. A day later, his brother 
confessed to the crime.

The case highlighted a number of issues at all levels — with police, 
prosecutors, defense attorneys, and the judicial system — that fed into 
Cortez’s wrongful conviction. So representatives from each group did something 
rather revolutionary: They sat down together to figure out exactly what went 
wrong in an effort to prevent the same issues from cropping up in the future. 
Known as the Philadelphia Event Review Team, the group, in partnership with the 
Quattrone Center, undertook a root-cause analysis. The result was an exhaustive 
report, full of recommendations for reform.

The idea was to approach the situation as the “National Transportation Safety 
Board would look at a plane crash or the way a hospital would look at a 
wrong-side surgery,” Hollway said. “A well-run unit is good at remedying past 
wrongs. And the next step is for more and more jurisdictions to do what 
Philadelphia is now doing and say, ‘OK, we’ve identified a case that we think 
needs to be changed. Now let’s figure out why that case happened the way it did 
— not to blame people, but to learn from it.’”

The Quattrone Center has received a $1.6 million federal grant to take the 
model — a “sentinel event review” — to up to 20 other jurisdictions; Baltimore, 
Chicago, and Austin have all reportedly signed on.

Newman agrees that learning from a wrongful conviction is key to a CIU’s work. 
She’s on a training committee that will work with both prosecutors and police 
and has engagements to speak at prosecutor and defense attorney organizations 
to discuss the CIU and best practices. And she agrees that working with 
innocence organizations is also key; the Wayne County Prosecutor’s office has 
won a sizable federal grant to work in partnership with the Urban Institute and 
the Western Michigan University Cooley Law School to set up a database tracking 
wrongful convictions and the factors that lead to them, which she hopes will 
aid CIUs across the country.

(Notably, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel recently announced that she 
will be starting a statewide CIU based on the Wayne County model. Hollway finds 
this encouraging, in part because it may offer an opportunity for smaller 
jurisdictions without the resources to set up an independent CIU. New Jersey’s 
attorney general has also announced the formation of a review unit.)

While Wayne County hasn’t undertaken a formal event-review process like 
Philadelphia’s, Newman says she’s walked both prosecutors and police through 
each of the cases her unit has tackled.

She recalled talking with one prosecutor about a case the prosecutor had 
handled, in which the CIU was now recommending the defendant be cleared. “She 
was kind of stunned,” Newman recalled, and didn’t have much to say. But the 
next day, she came back to Newman’s office, crying. “She had thought about it 
all night; she felt horrible.” She asked Newman whether it was her fault. No, 
Newman told her, there were other factors at play. But the prosecutor kept 
apologizing. “I’m like, ‘Don’t apologize, because you’re exactly the kind of 
prosecutor we want to have. You care.’”

Anyone would feel bad if they had convicted an innocent person, Newman recalls 
telling her colleague. “And a good prosecutor should be thinking about ‘Is 
there something else? Is there something I could have done so that this 
wouldn’t have happened?’”

(source: theintercept.com)