Sunday, May 25: The A.D.D. Detective
DEATH ‘n’ TEXAS
by Leigh Lundin
"Earlier this month, hundreds of people witnessed a moving display of justice and compassion at the Innocence Project’s annual benefit in New York. While pianist Jonathan Batiste played “What a Wonderful World” at the close of the event, two attendees got up on stage to dance, but not just any two.
These two were Dennis Fritz, who spent a decade in Oklahoma prison for a murder he didn’t commit, and Peggy Carter Sanders, the mother of the young woman Dennis was wrongfully convicted of killing. These were two people with a long history, and now they’re joined in a singular mission to seek fair justice for all."
from InCase, quoting from The Innocence Project
Also earlier this month, America freed its 129th exonerated death row inmate since 1983, after the death penalty was reinstituted in the late 1970s. This number does not include inmates almost certainly believed to be innocent, but who are "procedurally barred" from qualifying for rehearings or appeals under the stringent guidelines of our justice system, or are victims of ‘lost’ or destroyed evidence.
In fictional crime writing, our stories are neat little packages, properly wrapped, tied off neatly, and we rarely consider the aftermath of conviction. We writers, particularly those of us with exposure to criminal law, know this seldom happens in real life.
Moving beyond capital crimes, the Innocence Project has exonerated 216 defendants convicted of violent crimes, largely sexual assault, primarily upon DNA evidence. In addition to the Innocence Project, a number of religious and student work groups have achieved success in freeing inmates, despite resistance from prosecutors who strongly resist suggestions of mistakes, malfeasance, and political motivations.
Readers may remember Texas Governor Bush denied his state, the leader in executions, ever executed innocent men. Meanwhile in Florida, even though Governor Bob Martinez began signing death warrants from his second day in office (clearly showing he wasn’t bothering to read the cases), Florida continued to lag behind Texas in executions, an embarrassment for our Sunshine State. We disappointed Floridians, concluding we had no one in the state capable of being governor, imported Jeb, another of the Bush brothers. Though the competition was fierce, we never managed to attain first place for executions and had to settle for number two in the nation. Don’t mess with Texas.
Given its capital punishment history, it might come as a surprise that Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins has recently been called America’s best prosecutor. Unlike the majority of prosecutors who resist or even thwart reinvestigations of death row cases, Watkins has thrown open his office’s files for review.
Craig Watkins takes the meaning of ‘justice’ seriously. Jettisoning his office’s motto "convict at all costs" under previous boss Bill Hill, Watkins established a Conviction Integrity Unit. He fired nine prosecutors and another nine resigned under a cloud of questionable prosecutions. In conjunction with the Innocence Project of Texas, their team has exonerated 17 men out of 20 with the three other exonerations likely.
You may be surprised to learn that some citizens vehemently object to opening old cases, even as prisoners are being proved innocent. 
Talk radio opponents speak of "old history", "reopening old wounds", "subverting the established justice system", "defeating closure", damaging the "integrity of the criminal system", "an international embarrassment", and "a waste of taxpayer’s money". In the face of saving the lives of the wrongly convicted, such complaints are jaw-dropping, but they have political muscle behind them: it’s possible funding for the Conviction Integrity Unit is at risk.
Convictions of a Nobel Candidate
When talking about awry death row cases, talk often seems focus on the deep South, which is neither fair nor indicative. In 2000, Illinois Governor George Ryan became so convinced after a number of death penalty cases were overturned based upon DNA evidence that he commuted the sentences of 154 death row inmates.
"I now favor a moratorium, because I have grave concerns about our state’s shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row."
Can a Montana?
Another highly questionable case is that of Montana’s Barry Beach, now 47, sentenced to 100 years without parole in a killing that happened in his town when he was 17 years old. This case, which became a Dateline NBC special, was one of prosecutorial malfeasance, ‘junk science’ laboratory malpractice, poor CSI procedures, and missing evidence complicated by a police officer who broke into the evidence locker he was supposed to be guarding. Why? Because his daughter was under suspicion. Other parties never investigated have made on-again / off-again confessions pointing not to Barry Beach, but a group of jealous girls.
Members of the victim’s family don’t believe Beach is guilty and a hundred members of the community, including the mayor, have signed a petition seeking Beach’s release. However, like many convicted felons who may not be guilty, innocence is "procedurally barred", meaning even if innocence can now be proved, courts are either under no obligation to rehear the case or are procedurally barred from rehearing it, under the concept that no new evidence may be introduced during appeals.
Centurion Ministries is a small group with a paid staff of five supported by Montanans for Justice. They accept only cases in which they are thoroughly convinced of a party’s innocence. They managed to not only discredit the investigation, prosecution, and defense of Barry Beach, they went so far as to identify the presumably guilty parties. Although exoneration appeared to be a slam-dunk, a panel appointed by the governor found no reason to overturn the conviction, apparently believing it inconceivable that a group of jealous girls was incapable of violence, despite sporadic confessions and admissions.
Government Findings
Two decades ago, the U.S.Senate authorized the Department of Justice to conduct a study to determine the accuracy of convictions. In a breakdown, nearly three quarters of wrongful convictions are caused by eyewitness misidentification, either deliberate or inadvertent. Another source of wrongful conviction is litigative, split between prosecutorial malfeasance and defense incompetence.
The study concluded that conservatively one out of twenty is wrongly convicted and that number might be as high as one in ten. In a nation that has more of its population in prison than any other western country (and many third world nations), that’s between an eighth and a quarter of a million innocent people.
Kirk Bloodsworth, the first inmate freed from death row by DNA testing said, "Now I am not a mathematician, but (129 exonerated convictions) would give me pause."
The 129 exonerated death row inmates is a fraud, easily discoverable by fact checking. Based upon a variety of studies and admissions by those who claims these high numbers, there is a 70%-83% error rate in these claims, with the higher percentage being the most likely, indication that 22 out of those 129 may be actually innocent.
Please review:
The Death Penalty: More Protection for Innocents
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters, contact info below
Often, the death penalty dialogue gravitates to the subject of innocents at risk of execution. Seldom is a more common problem reviewed. That is, how innocents are more at risk without the death penalty.
Living murderers, in prison, after release or escape or after our failures to incarcerate them, are much more likely to harm and murder, again, than are executed murderers.
This is a truism.
No knowledgeable and honest party questions that the death penalty has the most extensive due process protections in US criminal law.
Therefore, actual innocents are more likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment and more likely to die in prison serving under that sentence, than it is that an actual innocent will be executed.
That is, logically, conclusive.
16 recent studies, inclusive of their defenses, find for death penalty deterrence.
A surprise? No.
Life is preferred over death. Death is feared more than life.
Some believe that all studies with contrary findings negate those 16 studies. They don’t. Studies which don’t find for deterrence don’t say no one is deterred, but that they couldn’t measure those deterred.
What prospect of a negative outcome doesn’t deter some? There isn’t one … although committed anti death penalty folk may say the death penalty is the only one.
However, the premier anti death penalty scholar accepts it as a given that the death penalty is a deterrent, but does not believe it to be a greater deterrent than a life sentence. Yet, the evidence is compelling and un refuted that death is feared more than life.
“This evidence greatly unsettles moral objections to the death penalty, because it suggests that a refusal to impose that penalty condemns numerous innocent people to death.” (1)
“ … a serious commitment to the sanctity of human life may well compel, rather than forbid, (capital) punishment.” (1)
“Recent evidence suggests that capital punishment may have a significant deterrent effect, preventing as many as eighteen or more murders for each execution.” (1)
Some death penalty opponents argue against death penalty deterrence, stating that it’s a harsher penalty to be locked up without any possibility of getting out.
Reality paints a very different picture.
What percentage of capital murderers seek a plea bargain to a death sentence? Zero or close to it. They prefer long term imprisonment.
What percentage of convicted capital murderers argue for execution in the penalty phase of their capital trial? Zero or close to it. They prefer long term imprisonment.
What percentage of death row inmates waive their appeals and speed up the execution process? Nearly zero. They prefer long term imprisonment.
This is not, even remotely, in dispute.
Life is preferred over death. Death is feared more than life.
Furthermore, history tells us that “lifers” have many ways to get out: Pardon, commutation, escape, clerical error, change in the law, etc.
In choosing to end the death penalty, or in choosing not implement it, some have chosen to spare murderers at the cost of sacrificing more innocent lives.
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Furthermore, possibly we have sentenced 20-25 actually innocent people to death since 1973, or 0.3% of those so sentenced. Those have all been released upon post conviction review. The anti-death penalty claims that the numbers are significantly higher are a fraud, easily discoverable by fact checking.
6 inmates have been released from death row because of DNA evidence. An additional 9 were released from prison, because of DNA exclusion, who had previously been sentenced to death.
The innocent deception of death penalty opponents has been getting exposure for many years. Even the behemoth of anti-death penalty newspapers—The New York Times—has recognized that deception.
“To be sure, 30 or 40 categorically innocent people have been released from death row … ”. (2) This when death penalty opponents were claiming the release of 119 “innocents” from death row. Death penalty opponents never required actual innocence in order for cases to be added to their “exonerated” or “innocents” list. They simply invented their own definitions for exonerated and innocent and deceptively shoe horned large numbers of inmates into those definitions—something easily discovered with fact checking.
There is no proof of an innocent executed in the US, at least since 1900.
If we accept that the best predictor of future performance is past performance, we can reasonable conclude that the DNA cases will be excluded prior to trial, and that for the next 8000 death sentences, that we will experience a 99.8% accuracy rate in actual guilt convictions. This improved accuracy rate does not include the many additional safeguards that have been added to the system, over and above DNA testing.
Of all the government programs in the world, that put innocents at risk, is there one with a safer record and with greater protections than the US death penalty?
Unlikely.
———————–
Full report—All Innocence Issues: The Death Penalty, upon request.
Full report—The Death Penalty as a Deterrent, upon request
(1) From the Executive Summary of “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required? The Relevance of Life-Life Tradeoffs,” March 2005
Prof. Cass R. Sunstein, Cass_Sunstein@law.uchicago.edu
Prof. Adrian Vermeule, avermeule@law.harvard.edu
Full report: http://aei-brookings.org/admin/authorpdfs/page.php?id=1131
(2) “The Death of Innocents’: A Reasonable Doubt”,
New York Times Book Review, p 29, 1/23/05, Adam Liptak,
national legal correspondent for The NY Times
—————————–
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters
e-mail sharpjfa@aol.com, 713-622-5491,
Houston, Texas
Mr. Sharp has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC, NPR, PBS , VOA and many other TV and radio networks, on such programs as Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The O’Reilly Factor, etc., has been quoted in newspapers throughout the world and is a published author.
A former opponent of capital punishment, he has written and granted interviews about, testified on and debated the subject of the death penalty, extensively and internationally.
Pro death penalty sites:
homicidesurvivors.com/categories/Dudley%20Sharp%20-%20Justice%20Matters.aspxwww.dpinfo.com
http://www.cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DPinformation.htm
http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/links/dplinks.htm
http://www.coastda.com/archives.html
http://www.lexingtonprosecutor.com/death_penalty_debate.htm
http://www.prodeathpenalty.com
http://www.yesdeathpenalty.com/deathpenalty_co
yesdeathpenalty.googlepages.com/home2 (Sweden)
http://www.wesleylowe.com/cp.html
Permission for distribution of this document, in whole or in part, is approved with proper attribution.
Criminal Brief is a site dedicated to the readers of short mystery fiction. It was never conceived as a site for engaging in political debate. There is room under the tent of crime fiction for everyone.
I have made my feelings on the political neutrality of CB very clear to my colleagues, but I also promised the contributors that they have carte blanche with regard to subject matter, as long as it might conceivably be relevant to the theme of the site. The administration of justice is clearly such a topic.
My own political convictions I will keep to myself, as I do not consider CB an appropriate forum for airing them. This is, however, only my personal position and others are free to enter the debate as they see fit.
But I am giving fair warning that as its editor, I will not allow this site to descend into polemics. As long as a civil tone is maintained, I will not intervene. But the instant there appear any ad hominem attacks, direct insults, or intemperate language, I will pull the plug on the whole discussion.
Don’t mess with Texas…..
Best line in the article!!!
JLW, I greatly appreciate your comments regarding keeping a civil tone.
I am writing tomorrow’s Memorial Day blog on Women of Mystery in honor of those who died in the service of their country so that we can have civil debate in open forums, and while that may not be the intent of our mystery writing blogs, I’m sure it will occasionally happen as it has here.
Terrie
Greetings, Dudley, and thank you for taking the time to write such a broad and far-reaching response. I particularly appreciate that y’all are from Texas, since much of the article was focused there.
DNA evidence seems pretty conclusive, but that’s just my impression. When The Innocence Project offices open during the week, I shall asked I.P. to either confirm the 129 exonerations or accede they are in error. If they reply, kindly return to respond.
Again, thank you and, whatever the topic, feel to comment anytime.
The Innocence Project Event was wonderful.
On my blog, Barbara’s Journey Toward Justice, Date Sunday July 6th, 2008, I have a post about it. I started my blog after I read Dennis Fritz’s book, “Journey Toward Justice”. Title of post – Video – Author John Grisham discusses his book The Innocent Man
Video – Author John Grisham discusses his book The Innocent Man at the Innocence Project’s Annual Benefit. The video opens with Exoneree Dennis Fritz dancing with the mother of the murder victim in the case for which he was wrongfully convicted. The evening was billed as a Celebration of Freedom and Justice “. You may find it interesting. I also have exclusive photos.