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.
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Burris’s Baggage
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Yet after Kenney read the voluminous record of the case, it was apparent to her that an innocent man had been railroaded onto death row. She turned to her colleagues for advice, but found no comfort there. The only suggestion from her colleagues was that she write a weak appellate brief and hope for the best. But she could not abide that. "I knew it was terribly wrong," she recalled recently. "I started to wonder what kind of people I was working with."
Kenney wrote a confidential memo urging Attorney General Burris to acknowledge error in the case, thus paving the way for Cruz to get yet another trial, but to no avail. She concluded she had no choice but to abandon the career to which she had so long aspired.
"I cannot sit idly by as this office continues to pursue the unjust prosecution of Rolando Cruz," she wrote in an impassioned letter of resignation to Burris, who assigned the case to another lawyer in the office. Nine months later, to Kenney's great consternation, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed Cruz's conviction. But the story still wasn't over. As a result of Kenney's courageous stance, intense attention was now focused on the case, both by the media and by the local community. The deans of six Illinois law schools and a group of prominent former prosecutors filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of a rehearing for Cruz. In 1994, the state Supreme Court bowed to the pressure and reversed the second conviction, awarding Cruz yet another trial, his third.
As the trial approached in 1995, DNA technology had advanced sufficiently to link Dugan and Dugan alone to the crime. The trial nonetheless commenced, though it ended abruptly when a DuPage County sheriff's lieutenant admitted on the stand that officers who claimed to have informed him of the dream statement at the time Cruz supposedly made it in fact could not have informed him, because he was on vacation. An incredulous judge acquitted Cruz, removing him from legal jeopardy after 11 years, 34 weeks and four days behind bars for a crime he did not commit. In 2002, Cruz received a gubernatorial pardon based on innocence.
Burris retired with what those unfamiliar with his conduct in the Cruz case might call dignity. Kenney went on to a rewarding career championing the legal interests of abused and neglected minors and disabled adults. Like the heroine in Harold Bell Wright's novel, she found the light lingering long after the sun had set.
Warden is executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law.
© 2009
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