Death Penalty – ‘Questions of fairness and reliability’

Catching up on recent and not un-important news…

Ready for this?

Although Alabama has half the population of Georgia, it sentences four times as many people to death.

That’s pretty staggering. Per capita, Alabama has 8 times as many people sentenced to death as Georgia does?

Some Alabamians, no, most Alabamians want to take a break in sentencing people to death, to make sure Alabama is getting it right.

Most Alabamians support the death penalty, but a majority of Alabamanians would choose to “suspend it until questions of fairness and reliability are studied,” according to a poll last year.

Get this… 147 municipalities in the nation have called for a death penalty moratorium; forty of them are in Alabama alone, from Birmingham and Bessemer on down to Emelle.

The American Bar Association made news with its study released last week “that members said shows Alabama’s system is unfair and inaccurate.”

One lawyer on the assessment team explained to me that the ABA sought to establish objective criteria that didn’t depend on how liberal or conservative the members of the state’s assessment team were. I said, “So if you are counting the number of peas on a plate, it doesn’t matter if you are a liberal or a conservative?” Right, he said. It is what it is.

You can see the Compliance Charts (Word doc) used to report the findings at the ABA site, and quickly get a sense that the state is measured against some pretty straightforward criteria.

Indeed, The Birmingham News said:

The ABA has developed 79 standards for measuring the way a state carries out the death penalty. Alabama – the second state to undergo the ABA review – fully complied with only four. It partly complied with 14 others, and wholly failed on 37 of the remaining standards.

Among the problems cited:

The state doesn’t provide adequate or consistent legal defense for those charged with capital crimes, either at the trial level or during appeals.

The state doesn’t have a process for making sure the death penalty is used uniformly for similar crimes.

The state doesn’t have a law to address people who were convicted of capital crimes before DNA testing was developed for blood, semen and other biological evidence.

Even when Alabama juries recommend a defendant receive life in prison with no chance for parole, elected judges can impose a sentence of death.

The Attorney General, who is responsible for defending state statutes and enforcing state law except when he decides not to, has come under fire for his unwillingness to consider the evidence.

For example, The Birmingham News:

Witness Attorney General Troy King’s response to the Bar Association’s findings. “The ABA is a liberal, activist organization with an agenda they constantly push,” King said.

That’s a cheap insult to the bright Alabama legal minds that invested their time in this review.

Notice King didn’t argue Alabama runs a flawless death penalty operation. That’s because he can’t. The system is frighteningly flawed.

Or The Decatur Daily:

The ABA study (www.abanet.org/moratorium) deserves serious consideration by state officials — not politicking. That’s why Alabama Attorney General Troy King’s reaction is disappointing.

Troy King said, “Nobody can point to an innocent person in Alabama who has been executed,” which strikes me as a pretty inadequate response. One, people have been released from Alabama’s Death Row. Two, after an execution, efforts to determine innocence of the executed tend to drop off pretty dramatically. And three, King may be right. A careless driver might rightly say “Nobody can point to a single accident I’ve had,” but he is still a careless driver who is more likely to have an accident than those who operate with care.

My take is that the ABA has tried to be even-handed on a matter of life and death. If someone like Troy King wants to take exception to their conclusions, then the classy and appropriate response is to explain your particular objection to their methodology & criteria, rather than to resort to name-calling. The ABA is not some fly-by-night outfit that sprang up for the purpose of promoting an agenda. Their careful study (taking 20 months in Alabama) deserves careful consideration and response.

Editorials from papers like The Decatur Daily, Tuscaloosa News (and another one here), and The Birmingham News agree. For the sake of human life, we owe it to ourselves to be our best on this.