Source: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/past/62/2005
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 18:21:53+00:00

Document:
More varieties of murder qualify for the death penalty in Alabama than in most states, and some prosecutors charge every crime that qualifies as a capital crime.
That may sound like a good thing - a way to really crack down on violent crime and stick it to criminals. But the people who are really getting stuck are Alabama taxpayers.
That's because capital cases cost more than those that don't have a chance of ending in the death penalty, as demonstrated in a story on Sunday in The News.
In fiscal 2005, the state's bill for capital defense was on average $20,416 - a small sum, really, but almost 16 times as much as the $1,300 average indigent defense in class-A felony cases. Why? When a defendant's life is at stake, the law requires two defense lawyers, an investigator and a specialist to look for mitigating factors that could make life without parole a more appropriate sentence than death.
The additional expenses are entirely justified, but the numbers add up: Since 2000, Alabama taxpayers have paid more than $14 million to defend people charged with capital murder.
Prosecutors say they're paid the same whether they're pursuing death penalty cases or not. But they don't dispute that death penalty cases usually take more of their time. That means they invest more of their office resources in capital cases than in noncapital cases.
But do the time and money translate to more death sentences? No.
Since 1990, 1,965 capital murder indictments have been brought and resolved in Alabama. Of the total cases, only 33% ended with a capital conviction and only 11% ended with a death sentence. In Jefferson County, the percentages are even worse. Of 716 resolved capital cases, just 25% ended with conviction and only 5% a death sentence.
Translation: Taxpayers are spending tremendous sums of money on capital cases that judges and juries do not believe merit death sentences.
Granted, Jefferson County District Attorney David Barber makes a valid case for bringing capital charges if the crime fits any of the death-penalty criteria. Prosecutors who pick and choose which crimes are worthy of death have been accused of (and have been guilty of) making arbitrary and unfair distinctions.
The problem is, Alabama's death penalty law also makes arbitrary and unfair distinctions. In one of the silliest provisions, simply shooting someone in a car or from a car is a capital crime. Shooting the same person on the street is not.
Of course, The News editorial board believes the state should abolish capital punishment altogether because of our views on the sanctity of life and our concerns that Alabama's death penalty is not foolproof or fair. But even those who endorse capital punishment have an interest in making sure the system is as cost-effective and rational as possible.
The Legislature could help by trimming the list of murders that qualify for a death sentence. A broader, uniform process to decide when prosecutors can pursue a capital charge would also help.
If the state is going to have a death penalty, at the very least it should be reasonably applied. To do otherwise is not only unfair - it's expensive.
(The Birmingham News, December 7, 2005) See Editorials, Arbitrariness and Costs. Read excerpts from The Birmingham News editorials calling on Alabama to abandon the death penalty.
In a ruling that criticized the state for concealing a $500 payoff to a key state witness in a 1997 death penalty case, the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously upheld a lower court decision ordering a new trial for Willie Palmer.
During Palmer's original trial, his attorneys had asked prosecutors to disclose any deals with state witnesses. At that time, they were only told about a plea bargain with Palmer's nephew, who had testified during the trial that he assisted his uncle in the killings of Palmer's wife and her daughter. This testimony was later corroborated by Randy Waltower, a paid drug informant whose payoff was not disclosed. After Palmer's conviction was upheld on direct appeal, his new lawyers again sought details of any other deals or payoffs made in the case. The state continued to resist all efforts to reveal confidential informant files in the case, including four documents that showed the state paid $500 to Waltower five days after Palmer's arrest. In spring 2005, a Superior Court judge requested the files outlining the Waltower payoff and determined that the state intentionally hid the payoff from Palmer's defense team "in defiance of its legal and ethical duties." This ruling prompted Georgia investigators to change their proceedures by ordering investigators to write down on case files whether confidential informants were used and paid so prosecutors will know it.
The Georgia Supreme Court noted: "We cannot countenance the deliberate suppression by the state of a payment to a key witness, and its attendant corruption of the truth-seeking process, in any case, and especially in a death-penalty case." The Court said that the state's decision to conceal the payoff violates the primary tenet of the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brady v. Maryland, which stated, "Society wins not only when the guilty are convicted but when criminal trials are fair." The state may retry Palmer for the murders. (Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 7, 2005). See Innocence.
DPIC's latest report, Blind Justice: Juries Deciding Life and Death With Only Half the Truth, addresses the scope of official misconduct in capital cases. Since 2000, 37 people have been released from death row. In 23 (62%) of these cases, state misconduct played a significant role in the faulty original trials. Read the report.
Lack of a statewide public defender system in Alabama creates wide disparities among circuits in their standards of indigent defense, or representation of defendants who can’t afford private legal counsel.
Alabama is among the few states that still allow judges in capital trials to override jury recommendations for lesser sentences and impose the death penalty.
Eighty-one percent of those executed in Alabama since 1976 were convicted of killing white people, yet only 35 percent of all murders in the state involve white victims.
Between 1973 and 2003, nineteen Alabama death penalty cases were reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct.
The 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision prohibiting execution of mentally retarded offenders left it to the states to define mental retardation. In failing to issue its own definition, Alabama places mentally retarded inmates at risk of unconstitutional execution.
Based on its findings, the ACLU has recommended at temporary halt to executions in Alabama to allow a thorough review of the state's capital punishment system. A July 2005 poll by the Capital Survey Research Center found that 57 percent of Alabamians would support such a moratorium on executions.
Alabama has the sixth -highest execution rate and the sixth-highest death-sentencing rate in the nation. There is no statewide public defender system, and 95 percent of those on death row are unable to afford representation. Five innocent people have been released from Alabama's death row since 1976.
(ACLU Press Release, "New Report Finds Fatal Flaws in Alabama's Death Penalty," October 20, 2005). Read the report. See Representation, Race, Prosecutorial Misconduct, Arbitrariness, and Innocence.
NEW VOICES: Federal Judge Says Death Penalty Is "Beyond Repair"
I have been a judge on this Court for more than twenty-five years. In that time I have seen many death penalty cases and I have applied the law as instructed by the Supreme Court and I will continue to do so for as long as I remain on this Court. This my oath requires. After all these years, however, only one conclusion is possible: the death penalty in this country is arbitrary, biased, and so fundamentally flawed at its very core that it is beyond repair.
The flaws are numerous and the commentators have documented them well. There have been numerous death row exonerations. In fact, in some states the pace of exonerations competes with the pace of executions. See e.g., Death Penalty Information Center Searchable Database, http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions.php, last accessed September 6, 2005 (indicating that since 2000, Louisiana has executed two individuals while five individuals have been exonerated from death row). Blatant racial prejudice continues to infest the system. See, e.g. Miller-El v. Dretke, 125 S. Ct. 2317 (2005). Peremptory challenges tilt the balance from the outset in favor of death. Id. at 2340 (Breyer, J., concurring). The election of state judges creates another subtle bias toward death. Justice John Paul Stevens, Address to the American Bar Association Thurgood Marshall Awards Dinner Honoring Abner Mikva (Aug. 6, 2005), available at https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/speeches/sp_08-06-05.html. Crime labs are unreliable, see Ralph Blumenthal, Officials Ignore Houston Lab’s Troubles, Report Finds, N.Y. TIMES, A10 (July 1, 2005); The Innocence Project, DNA News (documenting suspension of DNA testing in Houston, Texas as a result of lab incompetence); see also House v. Bell, 386 F.3d 668 (6th Cir. 2004), cert. granted 125 S. Ct. 2991 (2005), witness identifications continue to prove faulty, and false testimony and false confessions plague the system, see e.g., The Innocence Project, http://www.innocenceproject.org/case/display_profile.php?id=07 (case of Rolando Cruz). The death penalty has proved to be an ineffective cure for society’s ills, public support continues to erode, and we share the dubious distinction of being the only western democracy that continues to put its own citizens to death. Of particular relevance to this case, the bad lawyering and incomprehensible arbitrariness that permeate the system should disgust any person concerned with the fair administration of criminal justice. Many of these flaws are rightfully brought to the attention of the nation’s political leaders. Notwithstanding, many of these flaws are legally relevant to the Eighth Amendment question — namely, under “evolving standards of decency,” Trop v. Dulles, 356 U.S. 86, 100-01 (1958) (plurality opinion), “whether people who were fully informed as to the purposes of the penalty and its liabilities would find the penalty shocking, unjust, and unacceptable.” Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238, 360 (1972) (Marshall, J., concurring).
An even better argument, in my opinion, is that the death penalty violates the Fourteenth Amendment because it is so transparently arbitrary that the system in its entirety fails to satisfy due process. More than ten years have passed since Justice Blackmun’s statements in Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141 (1994) (Blackmun, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari), regarding the failure of the death penalty system due to the absence of consistency, rationality, and fairness in its administration. It has only gotten worse. Justice Stevens’s recent address to the American Bar Association thoughtfully makes the case that there are “special risks of unfairness” in the administration of the death penalty. Justice John Paul Stevens, Address to the American Bar Association Thurgood Marshall Awards Dinner Honoring Abner Mikva (Aug. 6, 2005) (“[W]ith the benefit of DNA evidence, we have learned that a substantial number of death sentences have been imposed erroneously. That evidence is profoundly significant - not only because of its relevance to the debate about the wisdom of continuing to administer capital punishment, but also because it indicates that there must be serious flaws in our administration of criminal justice . . . My review of many trial records during recent years has, however, persuaded me that there are other features of death penalty litigation [aside from ineffective assistance of counsel] that create special risks of unfairness.”).
As noted above, while the system suffers from many flaws, much of the arbitrary imposition of the death penalty stems from the exceedingly distressing fact that during all my years on the bench, the quality of lawyering that capital defendants receive has not substantially improved. In many cases it has deteriorated. In fact, one of the most clear examples of the arbitrariness of the death penalty is the common knowledge that those defendants with decent lawyers rarely get sentenced to death. Death has more to do with extra-judicial factors like race and socio-economic status than with whether death is deserved. A system, whose basic justification is the interest in retribution and general deterrence, is not served when guided by such irrelevant factors. Nor should a system of life and death hinge on the proficiency of counsel.
I have no delusions of grandeur and I know my place in the judiciary. My oath requires me to apply the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court of the United States. I will continue to do as I am told until the Supreme Court concludes that the death penalty cannot be administered in a constitutional manner or our legislatures abolish the penalty. But lest there be any doubt, the idea that the death penalty is fairly and rationally imposed in this country is a farce.
(Moore v. Parker, No. 03-6105 (U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, October 4, 2005) (Martin, J., dissenting) (emphasis added)). See Arbitrariness and New Voices.

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