welcome my name is natasha sherman and i am your host my guest today is robert sanger i could spend the first five minutes of the show just reading part of his bio but briefly he has been a criminal defense lawyer in santa barbara california for forty three years he is a certified criminal law specialist and has handled capital cases at the trial and post conviction level he has five capital cases pending currently he is also professor of law and forensic science at the center barber college of law and he is an activist committed to abolishing the death penalty welcome welcome bob thank you for being my gues i've only got you for about twenty five minutes so i think i'm going to throw a lot of questions at you so you can provide us with your expertise i guess the first question is the big question why should we abolish the death penalty well my answer to that personally is because it is wrong it's wrong to kill somebody after you capture don't lock them up it's not a killing in self defense it's not the killing in war it's a pretty much a cold blooded killing and i think as a society we should be better than that people generally seem to be also concerned most say also concerned with the cost but with the fact that the death penalty is is not administered effectively we're doing it life and death decisions and they're often got wrong we have a great number of wrongful convictions and we have some wrongful executions now that have been documented in recent history in it's a very serious consequence one that is your first of all so i think for all those reasons and then reinstated it and recently it was on the ballot and the people of california decided that they still want the death penalty so it's a bit mystifying to me and i suspect even to you but only one of the articles thank you wrote you talked about how in illinois they had put a moratorium on executions they did this study they came up with i think about eighty five items of things that needed to be changed or and california kind of it could be said to have the same issues and then some and yet here we are continuing the death penalty and california even refused to are often will be opposed to that there's a group called murder victims families for reconciliation which is a group of us are definitely comprised of families of  eventually as you know from the movie of the book got involved and made a spiritual advisor to people on death row she says you know there's no closure that's really a word used by the government of by people who sort of closure and he says if we were really worried about closure we wouldn't just appropriate the grief of strangers to serve a policy objective we would actively provide free long term mental health care and other services to the families of murder victims if we spent as much money helping survivors as we spend killing offenders then material needs would be met for the rest of their lives so we've got all this logic against the death penalty and i guess going back to there's some kind of vested interest in keeping it in place so what is the win for the people who have that vested interest what are they getting out of death well you'd have to ask the people i mean there are people who lost relatives who are very adamant in favor of the death penalty because they're still dealing with their grief and their anger and other things that are associated with that but i'm talking about the california legislature i hear and what what i what their best interests but that's a good question and i think it's really the opposite of a vested interest it's a fear of taking a position that might seem to be unpopular why quite funny to me because it just doesn't make sense in one of your articles you talk about flaws in the system found in all stages so the criminal process from a police investigations false confessions mistaken i witness identification failure to preserve exculpatory evidence unreliable jailhouse informants prosecutorial misconduct ineffective assistance perjured testimony tunnelvision undertrained judges in adequately fully informed jurors all of those places in the process have an opportunity to break down and now if somebody was going to have surgery and they named all those ten places along the way that they couldn't guarantee that there wouldn't be a breakdown you think they'd have surgery but we do it we continue to keep this in place i think yes some are ill equipped to do it and that was the whole idea of study the illinois working capital cases mistakes were made now but i think a study way to look at this is say if you were picking an umpire to preside over the world series or even of any kind of a shocked yes if they put i got injured and it's not to not to defame judges or not my eyes their commitment to what they do but it's just a fact and if you actually try cases and hint of cases of the courts and you get in front of a judge who doesn't know detail what the rules are and what all the problems are of these kinds it can be very very frustrating so there are a lot of problems him and that's just one of them but there are a lot of problems are documented of the weather documented is by the study of people who were actually not guilty but just people who didn't get retried because time elapsed but where they'd actually found the actual perpetrator and after years in prison often that the defendant did not commit the crime and was absolutely innocent you look back at what happened at those cases get trial and that's where we see the problems with  forensic science the bad forensic science what the judges making errors the snitch testimony the jailhouse informant testimony and things of that sort so it's very disheartening the five cases they have right now i was appointed by the california supreme court to represent people who were already convicted you know we've we've had one reversed for activists the word that two thousand and eleven you know i'm the government has appealed one more time to the supreme court so it's going back to the supreme court got another that was reversed we're now in the trial court down of l a we've been pending five years waiting  now that you mention it like not mentally capable this paper about i q and how some of the i q results were being tweaked to make them to make it possible for them to face the execution so the short version of this is that there are a couple of people whose want to but there are two primarily in the in the country who have been taking the position that if somebody is seeking relief accu that's a case that says you cannot execute a mentally retarded or what's now called intellectually disabled individual that they will testify for the prosecution that if a person is of color that you have to add five to fifteen points of their ice cube score which means that you know you pretty much can execute anybody of color you know it's it's based on a very it's based on flawed science is based on flawed everything but if you just look at it as as a colleague of mine once at actually as sociology professor who studied the death probably from that standpoint  so you're telling me that you have two people you have one person is black another person is white they've got exactly the same i q same background same adaptive behavior everything else but the government can execute the black individual and not the white individual the u s supreme court did not write search it right so they refused to hear the case even though this issue was very clearly grieved and of the man was executed texas two weeks later and he had a fifty two fifty four hundred fifty seven and then he had a sixty two on the various i q tests that he took grade the course of his life they ethnically quote ethnically adjusted his i q based on racial  corrected yet you know again i think most about are pretty much unaware because in my mind if people are listening to that what you know we should all be up in an uproar and  think that they can change the i q results so that they can execute him is executed and there's a will there's a lot of science behind this and it's not simplistic explanation but basically the answer is there is no racial basis to adjust i q scores of race to start with this  construct it's not a genetic scientific construct but there is no genetic basis for this it's all based on a lot of dealing with statistics you know somewhat unsophisticated fashion to come up with this conclusion so you know one thing i can tell you is that whatever i'm asked about this paper and i was asked to give a paper of disability rights conference last month earlier this month you know baltimore with a lot of lawyers a lot of professors you know and almost all of them were equally amazed as you are they say i didn't know this is happening so all i can tell you as this is why i get up in the morning is that there are things like this that are happening and we all have to be vigilant and fight about yeah and do you want to say anything about what's going on in arkansas well i think what was going on  arkansas was is off i haven't had a chance to check the news today but you know they had eight execution scheduled in fourteen days and people are saying well this is the biggest mass execution i have to say i thousand people that are just ready to be executed the government thinks are ready yet to cure and now the big thing for me just just make this point because i think it's very important death row in california california as well as throughout the south where most of the death states are but there are some that was the the death rows are disproportionately populated by people of color they're disproportionately populated by people with mental with money on death row and california the director of corrections testified to that there are no people everybody on death row is poor the way you put it and there are also people who were subject to abuses children disproportionately basically we're taking a marginalized people in society and they end up on death row to write a factors that implicit bias the fact that they may not have the best lawyers the fact that various things happen and we end up proving this by looking at the results of the results are that people are of color there they're poor or they were abused as children and they have mental health issues so when we are to go to execute people if we would execute people in california it would be terrible we hear about optics these days it's bad optics and politics you imagine lining people up to execute one after another where most of the people are color and to have these other issues you know bryan stevenson is a wonderful lawyer  allowed to kill people as a government after what happened and yet in the united states here we have slavery we have jim crow we've got the results of slavery we now have a disproportionate number of people by death row who are black or of color oh you know it's it's obscene and what bryan stevenson said can you imagine if germany reinstituted the belly and oh yes by the way most of the people who are going to kill  jewish yes so these some of these mindsets you know we we end up in the paradigm of as you know thomas kuhn the paradigm revolution that you have to have in your head to get from execute that's so unbelievable and you know the word is correct it is obscene and you know we kind of place ourselves in the position of moral superiority you know when it comes to comparing ourselves with democracy at that hour with the rest of the world and here we are incarcerating that the largest percentage of people of a population in parser rated and then killing people as as a way of solving problems and as somebody stated there is no such thing as a full proof full proof death penalty and there is no way to reverse on this day yeah absolutely  true and we you know we learned so much about about various things you know one of my passions and one of the things i teach is forensics because there been so many years and projects on the friends of community knows that well as you fix those things  law but we cannot guarantee that that will eliminate a wrongful conviction of the roadblocks accused you don't want because you know people when they get involved in high profile cases high stakes cases they think larger than life and i've seen this in some high profile and i definitely cases that you know people think larger than life and when they start thinking larger than life they stop thinking  about life and like like a normal more honorable judge or normal prosecutor would do they start they start turning when it becomes a competitive enterprise it's of a search for for truth and that's why we have so many cases  is so compelling is that you know it's only now that with d n a evidence and we're now finding that there are a lot of people who are innocent so if we're killing people there's always going to be some percentage of that that are going to be innocent and it's part we're probably going to find out that it's a larger percentage than we know up until now so if there's any chance of killing an innocent human being it's just unfathomable because we're killing a human being for killing a human being but we're willing to take the chance that that person is innocent so in our last three minutes what would you like us to pay attention to  get mobilized about well i have personal i really appreciate the opportunity to come out and speak with you about this and you've obviously studied it and you're you're you're right on point and what we need to do i think one of the things that is very important is that we mobilize local groups and support of people to attack the definitely word exists in the that there are a lot of states that have the death penalty of the bucks but they do not use it but there are a lot of states that use it they use it routinely california has been putting people on death row who have been executing them but that will change if the law doesn't change they've got texas that conviction executes on a regular basis florida a number of other places you've got arkansas now that's trying to catch up with their quote backlog of human beings you know all of this is all of this should call out for some some grassroots work in california we have definitely focused which also helps some other states but we're primarily located  here there are other organizations to abolish the death valley i think people just need to be aware of that and try to support it the supreme court of the united states we have held out some hope that we might get somewhere but we all know what happened ye recently politically it's still not impossible i used to think that that justice scalia of all people might have come around to our position eventually we did you know he did on a couple of other here but i think the bottom line here first of all is hurt like you and for death penalty focus is just to really like educate us and make us aware because we were going along in our lives not really recognizing until it hits the press like arkansas plans to kill this many people in this period of time but interestingly enough every time i get in my car i turn on n p r and every single day in the past week i've heard something about this issue so i think again a grassroots action is what's called for but we are at the end of our time i so appreciate you being willing to take the time to do this and  i appreciate your commitment to this so thank you thank you for your program thank you my name is natasha sherman thank you for joining u