We told you about Darnell Williams last week. The Prosecution and some jurors who convicted him supported his request for a stay of execution to allow DNA testing in his case. At the time of his conviction, DNA testing was not available. The Judge refused, saying he had no jurisdiction to order it.

Today, Indiana Gov. Frank O'Bannon granted Williams a 60-day stay of execution, so that blood evidence in the case can be DNA-tested. Williams was scheduled for execution this Friday.

With the release today of Joseph Armine in Missouri, there have now been 111 inmates released from death row as a result of their innocence claims, according to the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty. If Nicholas Yarris is released in Pennsylvania, see the post just under this one, the number will be 112.

Far more often than we want to admit, we are convicting innocent people and sentencing them to death,” said Steven W. Hawkins, NCADP executive director. “This is absolutely chilling for three reasons. First, it is a life-wrecking experience for those who spend decades on death row for a crime they did not commit. Second, it means we quite likely are executing innocent people. And third, it means crimes are going unsolved, which constitutes a continued threat to public safety.”

A new state law in Illinois prevents doctors from being present at executions:

A measure signed into law by Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Thursday will take doctors out of the execution process in Illinois. The law currently requires that a physician be on hand to pronounce an inmate dead after the death penalty has been carried out.

The physicians felt this was a conflict of their Hippocratic Oath," said state Sen. John Cullerton (D-Chicago), the sponsor. "It was totally unnecessary to have a physician in that position. This says a coroner could easily determine the cause of death."

We understand from Rev. Mr. George Brooks, Director of Advocacy for Kolbe House in Chicago, that praise goes to the tenacious Dr. Ann Dunlap, who fought and lobbied for this legislation for over 10 years and got the Illinois Medical Association on board.

The last thing the jury saw and heard before deciding whether to sentence to Christopher Trotter to life or death for the brutal murder of a pregnant woman was a 90 minute video tape of his father. The jurors looked very solemn as they left the courtroom--they returned hours later with with a life verdict. A very moving story.

[thanks to Rev. Mr. George W. Brooks, Director of Advocacy, Kolbe House, Chicago, for the link]

Excellent article about race and death penalty-qualified juries in today's New York Times, Facing a Jury of (Some of) One's Peers. We learned a new phrase from it--"bleaching of the jury"--

About the death penalty trial Ashcroft is forcing in Puerto Rico, 2 significant facts:

1. People who are not fluent in English are excluded from serving on federal juries/ In Puerto Rico, this means 1/2 to 2/3 of the country's residents are ineligible to serve.

2. Since capital jurors must be "death qualified", or willing to impose the death penalty in an appropriate case, death penalty opponents are not allowed to serve. Puerto Rico doesn't have a death penalty, it's against the Consitution there. At least another 11 to 17% of residents will be disqualified on this ground.

So what's wrong with death-qualified juries?

Attorney General John Ashcroft is pushing the federal death penalty on Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico law doesn't allow for the death penalty and the people there are justifiably angry. Elaine Cassell of Civil Liberties Watch has more.

It seems as if Attorney General John Ashcroft never met a constitution he liked. His contempt for the US Constitution is the main theme of this website. But the AG does not favor one constitution over another with his contempt, if Puerto Rico is an example.

The Puerto Rican constitution bans the death penalty. Yet, Ashcroft and his prosecutors are seeking the ultimate punishment against men accused of kidnapping and murder and Puerto Ricans are not happy.

Our coverage of the Puerto Rico case is here and here.

Illinois Governor Rod Blajnovich will sign legislation calling for the mandatory taping of police interrogations. However, he doubts that reforms alone can fix Illinois's broken death penalty system. We welcome his remarks:

Even though he plans to sign the legislation, and while he reviews a more comprehensive death-penalty overhaul, Blagojevich said he was "not so sure" that a series of reforms "will make me feel comfortable that the death penalty can be implemented in Illinois without being prone to a mistake."

"As someone who supports the death penalty and as someone who would like to see the death penalty back in place in the right kind of cases, putting that aside, under no circumstances could I ever think about [an execution] unless I felt that we had reformed the system in such a way where we're not prone to making the kind of mistakes that were made in the past," Blagojevich said. "And I just don't sense we're anywhere near being at a point where that would be the case."

Blagojevich has previously said he would maintain the moratorium on capital punishment imposed by his predecessor, George Ryan, in 2000. In one of his final acts as governor in January, Ryan commuted the death sentences of 164 people on Death Row, meaning Blagojevich would be unlikely to face a decision on executions anytime soon.

Blagojevich is also concerned about racial profiling. also will sign a law

[he] also said he will sign a measure mandating law-enforcement training on racial profiling and requiring local police to record data in traffic stops so that it can be collected and analyzed to determine whether people are being pulled over based solely on their race....His signature would add Illinois to a list of more than 30 states that have adopted laws or have been ordered by the courts through consent decrees to require special training for police and monitoring of traffic stops.

Also to his credit, Blagojevich intends to sign into law a bill that "would require expunging of arrest records of people later found to be innocent."

The measure also creates a program to provide information to individuals who may be eligible to have their records cleared or sealed. It also provides for the automatic sealing of arrest and misdemeanor conviction records of people who have not had a subsequent conviction within three years.

We hope some other Governors take note and follow Blagojevich's lead.

In a Letter to the Editor of the New York Times, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo writes:

July 16, 2003
Death Penalty: Worth the Risk?

To the Editor:

Trapped in the System," by Bob Herbert (column, July 14), tells the harrowing story of the innocent Louisiana death row inmate Ryan Matthews and is a chilling reminder of the fallibility of America's criminal justice system, but New Yorkers should not delude themselves that innocent people sit on death row only in the Deep South.

Just last month, the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law, along with a coalition of volunteer attorneys from the tristate area, helped free three Nassau County men wrongfully convicted of the 1984 rape-murder of a Long Island teenage girl, after two rounds of DNA testing proved that a still unidentified man was the real assailant. These three men had spent 18 years in our state's prison system for a crime they did not commit.

If New York had the death penalty in the 1980's, John Kogut, Dennis Halstead and John Restivo would most likely have been executed years before DNA evidence in their case proved their innocence. In light of the ever-growing number of exonerations of the wrongfully convicted, New Yorkers should once again ask themselves if the death penalty is worth the enormous risk it poses of executing the innocent.

Hallelujah....the number of people being sentenced to death in the U.S. is declining. Read the comments by an Oregon prosecutor who seem to support the drop, thinking that the death penalty should be reserved for the worst of the worst.

"The point we're coming to in America is that we are going to keep refining and refining and refining those who are eligible for the death penalty," said Josh Marquis, the prosecutor for Clatsop County in Astoria, Oregon. "It should really be reserved for people like (Oklahoma City bomber) Timothy McVeigh," added Marquis, a death penalty proponent who chairs the Capital Litigation Committee of the National District Attorneys Association.

Given growing support for what Marquis called "true life" -- laws that provide no parole options, even Texas -- which has executed more in the modern era than any other state -- has begun to move toward a life-with-no-parole option, he said.

While we don't agree that Timothy McVeigh should have been executed, we welcome the shift in thinking. It's a start.

The July 14 issue of Time Magazine has an excellent report on the death penalty titled Guarding Death's Door . We don't express our praise for prosecutors too often, but when we do, we want you to know about it:

The death penalty is under attack. Scores have been wrongly convicted of capital crimes, and most Americans believe at least one innocent has been executed. Who can fix the system? Meet Ronnie Earle, veteran Texas prosecutor, death-penalty supporter — and a D.A. who has learned from his own terrible mistakes.

....[Earle] is trying to do in his corner of Texas what death-penalty opponents say is impossible: enforce capital punishment flawlessly, ensuring that the innocent never spend a day on death row and the guilty are sent there only after trials free of bias and vengeance. Earle hopes that by raising every conceivable doubt about defendants before he decides to seek the death penalty for them, he can slay the "demon of error" invoked by Governor Ryan and achieve total certainty in the capital system.

....Earle often sees himself as an advocate — for his constituents, for the state, for crime victims. Because of their role, prosecutors tend to be portrayed in popular culture as modern-day knights. But Earle has come to prefer another metaphor. "I'm the gatekeeper," he says. "I don't dare ask my boss, the public, to sit in judgment of somebody that I don't think deserves to die. That's why they elect me, to exercise that judgment and not bother them."

Buried in that philosophy is something radical — the notion that the jury system, as it's currently constructed, can't be trusted to send only the guilty to death row. Most prosecutors wouldn't embrace that philosophy, which is why it may take an Earle, not a knight, to slay the demon of error.

Bump and Update: We wrote this on Friday, but since many readers don't read the Sunday magazine until Sunday, we are bumping it up.

The Sunday New York Times Magazine has another fascinating examination of the death penalty called In the Face of Death, by Alex Kotlowitz. It examines 12 pro-death jurors in a gruesome murder case who found the defendant guilty but voted for life over death.

Whether someone lives or dies is the ultimate of Solomonic decisions, and 33 of 38 death-penalty states entrust it to a jury rather than to a judge. What happens when 12 people who support the death penalty face it up close?

Over the past few years, detective work and advances in DNA technology have uncovered a frighteningly high number of wrongfully convicted, especially on death row. But there may be another, albeit quieter, revolution taking place, out of view, in jury rooms. The number of death sentences handed down has dropped precipitously, from a modern-day peak of 319 in 1996 to 229 in 2000, and then to 155 in 2001. And a study released just last month reported that in 15 of the last 16 federal capital trials, jurors chose life sentences over death.

The article examines the trend, concluding:

There are two factors, however, that more than anything else may help explain the decline in death-penalty sentences. One is the increasing availability of life without parole as an option, which all but three death-penalty states now offer. In polls, three-fourths of Americans say they believe in the death penalty. But when asked whether they'd support capital punishment if life without parole was an option, the number is reduced to half.

The other contributor, perhaps tougher to measure, is a development over the last decade: an increasing number of defense attorneys have become more skilled and resourceful in persuading jurors that the lives of their clients are worth saving.

The article also explores the use of "mitigation specialists," whom no capital lawyer worth his or her salt would be caught dead without:

The Gainesville Sun has a series of articles on the Florida death penalty today. Here are the statistics, year by year. Here are the stats on current death row inmates. Here are the facts about Florida's death row.

Virginia Lazarerle is the only woman inmate on Florida's death row. She continues to proclaim her innocence.

In Stacking the Deck, the Gainesville Sun editorializes that if Florida insists on keeping the death penalty, it needs to make sure that defendants get adequate lawyers. Commenting on last week's Supreme Court decision granting a new trial to a death row inmate because of ineffective assistance of counsel, the paper writes:

The court's ruling is an important one in that it will oblige lower courts to give more scrutiny to the quality of a death row inmate's defense. "We know that the death penalty is generally not reserved for the prisoners who commit the worst crimes, but rather for those with the worst lawyers," says Bonowitz. "Maybe this ruling will change that a little bit."

Hopefully, it will also prompt Gov. Jeb Bush to reconsider his "cost-saving" plan to begin firing the state-employed lawyers who now handle capital appeals in favor of turning that work over to private attorneys. Death penalty cases are complicated matters that require considerable expertise and experience. The notion of subcontracting that work out in piecemeal fashion to private lawyers who may or may not specialize in death penalty case law is truly penny wise-pound foolish public policy.