Lawyers Move to Kill Death Penalty
American Bar Association Says ‘Serious Flaws’ Warrant Stay of Executions
By CHRISTINE BROUWER
Underfunded, understaffed and plagued by racial bias, the nation’s system for executing inmates is deeply flawed, and should be stopped until improvements are made, the American Bar Association said in a report released Sunday.
The report, which was based on research conducted in eight states, including Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Ohio, examined the “fairness and accuracy” of death penalty systems, and found “serious flaws in every state,” according to the authors.
“We just do not have confidence in the capital justice system after studying it,” Stephen Hanlon, chairman of the ABA’s Death Penalty Moratorium Project, told ABC News. “Capital defense systems are being underfunded, and unqualified and underresourced lawyers are defending death row inmates.”
“In determining who gets the death penalty,” Hanlon added, “all too frequently, it seems to be not the person who has committed the worst crime, but the person who has the worst lawyer.”
Sunday’s report, compiled by former judges, prosecutors, defense counsels, and other legal experts over a period of three years, detailed 13 separate sets of problems, including sloppy gathering and testing of DNA evidence, underfunded forensics labs, false confessions leading to convictions, and unreliable eyewitness testimony. (more…)
While I am a supporter of the death penalty, I am also for a defendant’s right to a fair due process. I have even heard that some of these DNA labs aren’t even certified not to mention cases where the defendant was given an ill-prepared attorney.
Here is a case in Indiana where the cost for just trying it is astronomical.
“The cost of trying to put Daniel Ray Wilkes to death in a triple murder case is approaching $300,000.
If convicted, Wilkes, 39, faces the death penalty in the April 2006 deaths of an Evansville mother and her two young daughters.”
[SNIP]
“…the average defense cost for a death penalty case in Indiana is about $375,000. She said that accounts for expenses through trial.” (source)
I don’t know if I am totally on board with a complete moratorium on the death penalty considering all the attention each execution is given these days, but I do agree that some serious and forceful reform is needed.
