Florida leads the nation in death row exonerations. Twenty-four inmates sentenced to die in Florida were later proved to be innocent. Meanwhile, just 74 people have been executed since the Supreme Court reauthorized the death penalty in the 1970s — so there is one exoneration for every three people executed in Florida. Nevertheless, a new law signed by Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) will speed up future executions and reduce the time available for attorneys to prove their client’s innocence.

The new law requires the governor to issue an execution warrant within 30 days of an inmate exhausting their legal remedies and require the execution to take place within 180 days after such a warrant has issued. In many cases, however, crucial errors in a prosecution are not discovered until years after a sentence is handed down. Hundreds of people, for example, may have been convicted due to flawed FBI analyses that were only recently revealed, despite the fact that government officials knew of the flaws for years.

A Brooklyn murder detective is facing scrutiny for possibly manufacturing evidence after the New York Times pieced together a string of murder confessions with suspiciously similar language.

In at least five cases handled by now-retired Detective Louis Scarcella, suspects began their confessions by saying either “You got it right,” or “I was there.” The discovery casts doubt on other murder convictions that relied on statements extracted by Scarcella.

One man, David Ranta, was even exonerated recently after two decades of insisting he never made his confession, which also started “I was there.” Scarcella claimed Ranta, an unemployed drug addict, suddenly decided to come clean about robbing and shooting a Hasidic rabbi.

Jabbar Washington, another man currently serving a lengthy murder sentence, supposedly owned up to a fatal home invasion by saying, “You got it right. I was there.” The confession was enough to convict him, even though he had an alibi and the survivors did not recognize him in court. Later, he told a jury that Scarcella forced him to sign a pre-written confession by grabbing him by the neck and testicles. The jury did not believe him, but Washington always maintained that the detective had fed him the confession.

If these confessions were indeed bogus, countless innocents may have been condemned to 20-year or longer sentences — not to mention subjected to possible abuse by police officers. Nor does Scarcella’s misconduct seem to be a freak incident. According to scholars interviewed by the Times, it is fairly common for detectives to prompt suspects, leading to false confessions with traces of law enforcement jargon in it.

The Chicago Police Department recently paid out millions to inmates after the discovery that detectives frequently forced confessions by torturing suspects in the 1980s. Several people had spent over 20 years in prison because they had been burned with cigarette lighters, suffocated, or threatened with a gun until they confessed to the crime.

Setting aside the egregious human rights abuses, these forced confessions to capital crimes should raise questions about several states’ enthusiastic death penalty policies. Florida lawmakers recently passed a bill that would speed up executions, prioritizing “timely justice” over rightful sentencing. Former death row inmates whose innocence was proven years after their conviction are protesting the bill, offering themselves as “living proof” that the criminal justice system often makes mistakes. Unmoved by the risk of executing an innocent person, one legislator argued, “Only God can judge. But we can sure set up the meeting.”

Last week, a coalition of civil rights organizations filed an ethics complaint against Judge Edith Jones of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, alleging that she claimed “racial groups like African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime,” and that she made inappropriate comments about the death penalty. In a likely sign that the court is taking the complaint seriously, a panel that includes both Jones and the court’s Chief Judge Carl E. Stewart just ordered a death penalty case transferred to another panel.

The complaint against Jones, which also alleges she discussed the facts of this particular case during the remarks that included her alleged offensive statements, is currently pending before Stewart. Judge Jones dissented from the panel’s order that effectively removes her from this case.

It should be noted that the court’s order rests on several unusual factors particular to the judges that sat on the original panel. In addition to citing the complaint against Jones, the order notes that Stewart’s duties as chief judge “give him a substantial role in the consideration of any complaint of judicial misconduct,” and that the third member of the panel is Judge James Dennis, who Jones once “showed disrespect toward.” While the opinion does not specify how Jones disrespected Dennis, this is likely a reference to a 2011 hearing when Jones told Dennis to “shut up.”

In other words, this court’s order may simply rest on the idea that a panel of three judges, one of whom is currently standing in judgment of the other and a third who has a history of tension with the second, is not likely to give the impression of impartial decision making. The order adds that “no inferences should be drawn about the merits of” the complaint against Jones.

Nevertheless, the fact that the court took this action over Judge Jones’ explicit objection suggests that Chief Judge Stewart is, at the very least, concerned about how the complaint against Jones reflects upon his court.

According to a complaint filed last week against federal appellate Judge Edith Jones, Jones suggested that African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed towards violent crime and that the death penalty is a public service because it allows inmates to “make peace with God.” Should these allegations against Judge Jones be proven, they will be only the latest examples of a career’s worth of nonchalance regarding executions. Indeed, as far back as 1990, a much younger Jones proposed a series of reforms to Texas’ execution procedures that would have increased that state’s execution rate by as much as twelve times.

In an article for the Texas Bar Journal entitled “Death Penalty Procedures: A Proposal for Reform,” which is available through the legal research service HeinOnline, Jones decries a capital punishment system in Texas which she views as too inefficient, in large part because judges delay executions by taking time to review death sentences to determine that they were lawfully handed down. Indeed, at one point Jones blames the slow rate of executions on “the frequent, human reaction of most judges . . . to defer a decision if any element of a case raises doubts, or to grant a temporary stay for further consideration.”

To speed along Texas’ ability to kill death row inmates, Jones proposes that Texas schedule “four to six executions per month, commencing six months to one year from the date” those execution dates are made public. Notably, in the five years prior to when Jones wrote this piece, Texas executed an average of just under six inmates per year, so the immediate impact of her proposal would have been to multiply the state’s execution rate eight to twelvefold.

It’s also worth noting that Texas’ execution rate did spike significantly in the years after Jones wrote this piece. Most significantly, during the four years after Congress passed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which limited the ability of death row inmates to challenge their sentences in federal court, Texas executed an average of 33 people per year. Nevertheless, in the modern era of American death penalty law, Texas has never executed the 48 to 72 people per year suggested by Jones’ piece. The deadliest year for Texas inmates was 2000, when 40 people were executed. 15 people were executed last year. Nevertheless, Jones concludes her list of proposals for expediting Texas’ executions by suggesting they could be viewed as “too lenient” because they would “take more than four years to conclude all the currently pending capital cases.”

A decade after publishing this proposal, Jones joined two opinions claiming that a man whose attorney slept through much of his trial could nonetheless be executed.

Even without Jones’ proposal for a wave of executions, Texas has a higher execution rate than any other state. More than one third of all U.S. executions took place in Texas since 1976, when the Supreme Court announced the modern constitutional regime governing death penalty cases.

(HT: James Gill)

“There’s just not a natural constituency to go to,” said Baltimore’s state’s attorney to explain why a pro-death penalty petition drive in Maryland failed. A conservative group that succeeded in delaying marriage equality in Maryland by forcing a ballot referendum on the issue hoped to replicate that success and trigger a similar referendum on the state’s new law repealing the death penalty. Instead, they fell about 3000 signatures short of the 18,579 they needed.

The failure of this ballot referendum lends additional support to arguments that the death penalty is unconstitutional. The Constitution forbids “cruel and unusual punishments.” So as a particular punishment becomes more “unusual” — or, in the Supreme Court’s words, as it ceases to be consistent with “evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society” — it become increasingly more difficult to justify under the Constitution. The Baltimore prosecutor’s admission that there is no “natural constituency” for the death penalty in Maryland is evidence that we are moving towards the point where state-sponsored executions can no longer exist under the Constitution.

Lest there be any doubt, Maryland is not alone in moving away from executions. To the contrary, Maryland is the sixth state in as many years to repeat its death penalty. Sixty percent of U.S. counties ceased seeking the death penalty altogether, and between 2004 and 2009 just 10 percent returned a single death sentence. At a national level, the death penalty has largely been isolated to a small number of mostly southern jurisdictions. This does not bode well for its constitutionality.

After an outcry from judges, professors, and other community leaders about the unjust and discriminatory imposition of the death penalty in Colorado, Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) agreed to indefinitely grant reprieve to death row inmate Nathan Dunlap, citing his uncertainty about the death penalty generally, and not his opposition to this particular execution. His order reads:

It is a legitimate question whether we as a state should be taking lives. Because the question is about the use of the death penalty itself, and not about Offender No. 89148, I have opted to grant a reprieve and not clemency in this case.

Hickenlooper also said Colorado’s system is flawed, citing a study that showed the death penalty was applied inconsistently. Hickenlooper’s announcement comes several months after the failure of a bill to abolish the death penalty. Ironically, the bill died after Hickenlooper suggested he might veto it, but the movement to expose Colorado’s broken death penalty system did not. In letters imploring Hickenlooper to commute Dunlap’s sentence, members of the NAACP exposed statistics that the three individuals on Colorado’s death row are all black, all from the same one county, and all committed their crimes before they turned 21. A group of judges lamented that Dunlap’s trial was rife with error, with Dunlap’s lawyer never even raising his history of bipolar disorder and psychotic tendencies.

Hickenlooper’s grant of a reprieve rather than clemency means that John Dunlap’s execution will be on hold until another executive order, according to the Denver Post. But Hickenlooper said it was “highly unlikely” he would revisit the decision, although another governor might. The decision means that Colorado is, in effect, not imposing the death penalty, and Hickenlooper’s public opposition may lead to a revival of legislation to officially abolish it. Eighteen other states have abolished the punishment, which data shows is disproportionately and arbitrarily applied and does not deter violent crime.

 

In March, Colorado came close to becoming the 19th state to abolish the death penalty, but the bill failed after Gov. John Hickenlooper (D) voiced opposition and suggested a possible veto. A few months later, Colorado’s death penalty is still firmly in place, and the state is poised to complete what would be only the second execution in 45 years (the last was in 1997). Few dispute that Nathan Dunlap committed a horrific crime and murdered several people at a Chuck E. Cheese. But judges, university professors, and other prominent state leaders are urging Gov. Hickenlooper to commute Dunlap’s sentence, both because crucial errors that defined his trial may have led him to get a harsher sentence than others, and because killing anyone under the perverted state system would be a miscarriage of justice. According to letters filed with Hickenlooper’s office:

• All three people on death row are black men. In a state that is only 4.3% African American, Colorado’s death row is 100% African American.
• All three men on death are from the same one county, out of Colorado’s 64.
• All three men committed their crime when they were under the age of 21.
• Two law professors who studied Colorado’s application of the death penalty concluded it was unconstitutional, after finding that prosecutors pursue the death penalty in less than one percent of the cases where it is an option, and that the state failed to set “clear statutory standards for distinguishing between the few who are executed and the many who commit murder.”

“It appears that race, geography and youth largely determines who gets the death penalty in Colorado,” wrote a group of NAACP leaders in a letter urging Gov. Hickenlooper to grant clemency. They note that not a single black juror served on the panel that sentenced Dunlap to death.

In addition to the injustices that define the Colorado system, a group of former Colorado judges also point out that Dunlap’s bipolar disorder and psychotic tendencies were not even mentioned at trial. In fact, according to their letter, Dunlap’s lawyer told the jury that there was no explanation for his violence.

The judges add that “no clear evidence exists that the death penalty deters violent crime. What it does in our current system, as in this case, is to drain our judicial system of millions of dollars as mandatory appeals drag on for decades.” Studies have shown that the death penalty does not lower the homicide rate. In fact, the murder rate is lower in states without the death penalty. Hickenlooper says he continues to wrestle with the death penalty, and whether to commute Dunlap’s sentence.

Several exonerated men whose innocence of murder was proven years after they were sentenced to death are imploring Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL) not to sign a Florida bill that would set automatic timelines for imposing the death penalty, and likely would have resulted in the execution of these and other innocent people.

The bill, known as the “Timely Justice Act,” was passed last month amid legislator sentiments that “timely justice” is more important than “guilt or innocence,” with one legislator saying, “Only God can judge. But we can sure set up the meeting.”

Now, as the deadline approaches for Gov. Scott to sign the bill, former inmates who escaped the death penalty are coming forward to demonstrate the extraordinary costs of the law’s passage, in a state with the highest number of exonerations, and more people on death row than any state but California.

“If Governor Scott would just sit with me and others like me, I know he will veto this bill that, if it had been law, would have ended my life – I am innocent,” said Seth Penalver, who sat on death row for 18 years before exonerating evidence emerged. “If he signs this bill into law, I fear other people who are innocent like me, will be unjustly executed by the State of Florida.”

Exoneree Juan Melendez wrote in the Huffington Post:

The “Timely Justice Act” would speed up a system we know has already sent innocent men, like myself, to death row. Some of these prisoners may be men like me, who have exhausted their legal appeals, yet keep trying to find a way to prove their innocence.

In multiple cases of current death row prisoners, we don’t know exactly what the legal claims are. Some of the men on Florida’s death row ran out of legal options simply because their attorneys missed filing deadlines.

In those instances, no court had the opportunity to evaluate the claims and determine whether they have merit. How can we possibly justify speeding up the execution of prisoners in those cases?

According to logic of the “Timely Justice Act,” any prisoner who has exhausted his appeals and been through a clemency process has had every opportunity and is ready for an execution date, regardless of the specific questions and issues that surround his case.

I am living proof that each case is unique and that the system must allow ample time for the truth to emerge.
Given Florida’s troubling track record on wrongful convictions, this legislation ensures the unthinkable — the execution of an innocent person.

Although the final version of the bill eliminated timelines for filing appeals and post-conviction motions, it would require the governor to issue an execution warrant to those who have exhausted their legal remedies within 30 days, and require execution within 180 days of the warrant. The problem is that when it comes to the death penalty, cases are reopened years later when new evidence finally emerges or defendants obtain the resources to uncover new evidence. In several recent instances, crucial errors in FBI analysis were not revealed until years after hundreds of individuals’ cases had been completed and decided.

Just this week in Florida, a man who was sentenced to death in 2006 is just now requesting a retrial, after he obtained lawyers in 2011 that secured testing of crucial DNA evidence.

In 2008, Montez Spradley was convicted for the murder of a grandmother shot dead in Center Point, Alabama. Although the jury recommended a sentence of life in prison without parole, an Alabama trial judge rejected the recommendation and sentenced Spradley to death. But that death sentence was struck down along with the conviction, when an appeals panel deemed the trial so error- and bias-ridden that it was a “miscarriage of justice.”

Now, as Spradley’s case enters the early stages of retrial, the ACLU has uncovered even more potentially damning evidence about prosecutors’ handling of his case, revealing yet another way in which commonplace prosecutor misconduct can lead to improper sentences to death. Spradley’s ex-girlfriend testified this week that she was offered a $10,000 reward in exchange for testifying against Spradley, and that prosecutors threatened to take away her children and prosecute her for perjury if she did not do so. AL.com reports:

At the court hearing today Alisha Booker testified that she lied at the 2008 trial that Spradley had confessed to her in a church about killing Jason.

Booker testified that after having denied any knowledge of the murder to police in 2004, she stepped forward later to tell police that Spradley had admitted it because she was mad at him. She said that at the time she stepped forward she was pregnant with her and Spradley’s third child. She said she learned he was cheating on her.

“I just felt he was doing me wrong at the moment,” Booker said.

As she began to testify that she had lied in her 2008 testimony, Wallace asked her if she knew that she could possibly be charged with perjury. After meeting in the judge’s office with her attorney for a few minutes she returned to the stand and continued her testimony. [...]

Booker said she had told law enforcement that she had lied and didn’t want to testify. She said they told her it was too late and that she had to stick to the story or she could go to jail for a long time and her kids put in foster homes. She said the detectives had told her she was a single mother and should take the reward money.

A prosecutor and the lead detective in the homicide case denied the allegations during today’s hearing.

The rewards offered to Booker were part of two local programs to incentivize witnesses to come forward with information about the crime. These rewards programs can be a helpful crime-fighting resource, when used properly. But they also create perverse incentives to provide false information, particularly when a witness merely provides testimony that is not corroborated by others or accompanied by physical evidence. Because prosecutors maintain primary control over access to this and other crucial information about a case, they are constitutionally required to divulge to defendants the existence of such a reward, or of any other exculpatory evidence, even though it may undercut prosecutors’ case. In this case, prosecutors dispute many facts, but they do not dispute that Booker was given a reward, nor that they failed to disclose that reward.

The under-appreciated U.S. Supreme Court decision that articulated this prosecutor obligation celebrated its 50th anniversary this week, but punishment for prosecutors who fail to comply with Brady v. Maryland remains largely non-existent, meaning those inclined to withhold evidence are still unlikely to be deterred by the law, and perhaps even less likely to be discovered.  This is one of several cases to reveal these blatant Brady violations even in instances where a defendant’s life is at stake, and in which judges subject to the politics of re-election use a dangerous Alabama policy to “override” jury decisions about the death penalty. And while Spradley earned a retrial, another judge exercising judicial override could once again sentence him to death.

Earlier this week, a Mississippi man escaped death by just a few hours when the state Supreme Court agreed to block his execution, scheduled for that Tuesday evening. Although hair sample evidence was available for testing, and Willie Manning’s conviction had hinged on unreliable jailhouse informant testimony, the court had just a week earlier refused to order DNA testing, and was prepared to allow the execution to go forward. It was only after the FBI revealed that its own analysis of key evidence was unscientific and invalid just days before Manning’s conviction that a court agreed, without comment, to block his execution.

Now, in another murder case involving similar FBI error, a man who spent 32 years in prison for a Maryland murder has been granted a new trial after DNA testing performed in March discredited key FBI statements that linked him to hair samples at the crime scene, and refuted statements about the origins of both the bullets and the gun used at the crime scene. The Washington Post reports:

The genetic testing contradicted testimony by an agent with the FBI Laboratory who said that he found [John Norman] Huffington’s hair in the bed where one victim was killed, claiming an accuracy rate of 99.98 percent.

“Due to the substantial weight given to the microscopic hair analysis by the jury . . . as well as the results of the DNA test . . . there is a significant possibility that the outcome of Petitioner’s case may have been different,” Dwyer wrote in a May 1 order that Huffington’s lawyers received Wednesday. […]

Huffington’s case was among those featured in a series of articles last year in The Washington Post, which reported that government officials knew for years that flawed forensic testimony and false hair matches may have led to hundreds of wrongful convictions. […]

Huffington’s lawyers said they did not know of specific problems with the FBI hair examination until informed by The Post that in July 1997, [Prosecutor] Cassilly considered and then rejected having the FBI review the case because the hair expert involved, FBI Special Agent Michael P. Malone, had been discredited.

Huffington was initially sentenced to death, before an appeals court lowered the punishment to two life sentences. The conviction hinged on both the FBI’s flawed data and the testimony of Huffington’s friend that he said he intended to use his gun to commit the crime. Huffington says he went home before the violent shooting and stabbing occurred.

Huffington’s case is one of potentially hundreds of cases in which prosecutors relied upon flawed evidence, according to a 2012 Washington Post investigation. Even in those cases in which the Department of Justice had already determined the FBI analysis was flawed, it only disclosed that fact to the defendants in 30 of 137 cases. Following the Washington Post report, the DOJ expanded the scope of its review to thousands of FBI analyses, and revealed the critically flawed evidence in Manning’s and Huffington’s cases. Only after the DOJ’s review did the FBI commit to testing Huffington’s DNA evidence. It is still unknown whether Manning’s DNA evidence will be tested.
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