Diann Rust-Tierney, Executive Director, National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (via Margaret Summers, Director of Communications)
This conversation is coming at an interesting time for the death penalty. As a recent report indicates, the death penalty is in decline as measured by a variety of factors. Since 2000, every region of the nation (except the South), and every state which averaged one or more death sentences annually has experienced a decline in the annual number of death sentences, including Texas, California and Florida, the major death penalty states. The annual number of death sentences has dropped about 60% since the 1990s, when the annual number was nearly 300.
Undoubtedly the costs to the states of death penalty cases have been a factor, particularly during the nation's current economic recession. California, for example, spends about $90,000 to incarcerate each death row inmate, more than if the inmates were serving life sentences. Death penalty cases are lengthy, which adds to their expense, as inmates wait years before being assigned attorneys for appeals.
And there's the distinct possibility of executing people who may be innocent due to: Pressures on law enforcement officials to solve homicides quickly, which may lead to mistakes and misconduct by the investigators and prosecutors. The frequent lack of eyewitnesses in murder cases, forcing the prosecutors to rely on questionable sources like jailhouse informants, accomplices looking for reduced sentences and defendants from whom a confession is coerced. The often meager resources provided to criminal defendants' attorneys often lead them to risk the client's conviction and save the client's life by spending more time preparing for the sentencing phase than for the actual defense. Preparation occurring at the expense of an investigation that could yield absolving evidence heightens the risk for a wrongful conviction. It's no wonder that more criminal justice and law enforcement officials are beginning to consider alternatives to capital punishment as a solution to capital crime. I hope we are fast approaching the day when the possibility of executing innocent persons like Rolando Cruz is a part of the distant past.
Burris’s Baggage
The man appointed to fill Obama's Senate seat ignored a warning about a troubling case that almost allowed an innocent man to be executed.
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Roland Burris, the former Illinois attorney general whom Gov. Rod Blagojevich has appointed to fill Barack Obama's Senate seat, has been widely praised as a man of honesty and integrity whose many years in public office have been free of scandal. Obama himself described Burris as "a good man and fine public servant."
In the Illinois lexicon, political scandal seems to be narrowly defined as using one's office to enrich oneself, as Blagojevich stands accused of doing. Burris, no doubt, has never done that. He has, however, done something that, in my view, is far worse: He ignored an explicit warning from an assistant attorney general that a young man sentenced to be executed in the name of the people of Illinois was likely innocent.
The story reminds me of a novel I first read as a teenager—Harold Bell Wright's "The Shepherd of the Hills," set in the Ozarks, not far from where I grew up. "In the hills of life," the novel begins, "there are two trails. One lies along the higher sunlit fields where those who journey see far, and the light lingers even when the sun is down; and one leads to the lower ground, where those who travel, as they go, look always over their shoulders with eyes of dread, and gloomy shadows gather long before the day is done."
This part of Burris's story begins in 1991, when a principled young lawyer, a former prosecutor named Mary Brigid Kenney, joined the attorney general's office. It was there that she found her way to the higher sunlit fields, while Attorney General Burris chose the trail leading to the lower ground.
Kenney's first assignment was to represent the interests of the state in the appeal of a case known as People v. Cruz. In 1985, Rolando Cruz had been convicted of rape and murder, along with a co-defendant, Alejandro Hernandez. Both men were sentenced to death for the crime. The conviction rested on dubious testimony by DuPage County authorities, who swore that Cruz had told them he had a dream about the crime, a dream that the prosecution said amounted to a confession. Cruz's jury accepted that, but eight months later, a serial killer named Brian Dugan confessed that he alone had committed the crime. Unlike Cruz's purported dream, Dugan's confession seemed iron-clad, rich in details that only the killer could have known.
By all rights, Cruz should have been exonerated at that point, but other forces were at work: his exoneration would have been embarrassing for the authorities involved in the original case, particularly state's attorney James Ryan, who had a burning desire to become governor. The conviction stood despite Dugan's confession.
Both Cruz and Hernandez won new trials as a result of judicial error, and their cases were separated, meaning they would be retried separately. Again, both were convicted. Hernandez was sentenced to life, but Cruz again got death. It was at this point that prosecutor Kenney was assigned to Cruz's case. She believed strongly in the integrity of law enforcement and assumed that any allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct swirling around this case were either unfounded or greatly exaggerated. "I thought nothing so bad could happen in our justice system," she later reflected. "This is the United States. We have a Bill of Rights."
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