[CUADPUpdate] The Failed Experiment

[Abraham J. Bonowitz]

Sent *ONLY* to the recipients of CUADPUpdate
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Greetings All!

You know its your first fathers day when you go 
out to a diner for breakfast and your back home 
by 8:15....  AM.  Smile.  We had a delightful day 
and I hope you and yours did too.  (Thanks Dad, 
for setting the standard.  Love, #3.)

IN THIS MESSAGE
The Failed Experiment
David Dow's Important Message
Leaders on Trial in NC
What's Happening in New Jersey?

****************



THE FAILED EXPERIMENT

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/13390313/site/newsweek/
Sunday, June 18, 2006 | Newsweek | June 26, 2006 issue

The Failed Experiment
Last year only four countries accounted for nearly all executions worldwide:
China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

By Anna Quindlen


You brush up against a lot of weird stuff in the course of child rearing, but
one phenomenon that always had me scratching my head was the parents who hit
their kids to teach them that hitting was a bad thing.

In their defense, they had a civic model for that kind of bizarre circular
reasoning. Americans still live in one of the few countries that kill people
to make clear what a terrible thing killing people is.

Hardly any other civilized place does this anymore. In the past three
decades, the number of nations that have abolished the death penalty has
risen from 16 to 86. Last year four countries accounted for nearly all
executions worldwide: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

As my Irish grandmother used to say, you're known by the company you keep.

Last week the Supreme Court agreed to cogitate once more about capital
punishment, a boomerang the justices find coming back at them time and time
again. This new case is about the way lethal injection is administered. The
argument is that even though one drug anesthetizes, a second paralyzes and a
third stops the heart, the first is not sufficient to mitigate the pain and
the second makes the inmate appear peaceful when he is in agony.

In other words, the case is about whether being put to death hurts. Passing
judgment on this particular issue is the equivalent of diagramming an
ungrammatical sentence.

Much of the debate about the death penalty since it reared its ugly head
again in the '70s has been about whether it is disproportionately meted out
to poor minorities, whether it should be permitted for juvenile offenders,
whether various methods constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Most of
these discussions are designed not to examine underlying deep moral issues
but to allow Americans to continue to put people to death and still feel good
about themselves.

That's become increasingly difficult. At the same time the court decided to
revisit lethal injection, the justices agreed to a federal hearing in the
case of a man who has spent 20 years on death row. He was convicted of raping
and murdering a neighbor. The prosecution said his semen was found on the
dead woman. New DNA tests show that the semen was instead that of her
husband, who witnesses say had drunkenly confessed to the murder.

This is just one of a long line of such cases. Accusers recant, guilty
parties confess, the lab makes a match that wasn't possible before. Since
1976, more than a thousand men and women have been executed in the United
States. But during that same period more than 123 death-row inmates have been
exonerated. That's a terrible statistical average. Put another way, more than
123 individuals truly guilty of savage crimes were walking free while someone
else sat waiting on death row. And most, if not all, of those death-row
inmates would have been wrongly executed if not for the lengthy appeals
process death-penalty advocates like to decry.

Some years ago the execution of a woman named Karla Faye Tucker in Texas got
a lot of attention. She had been found guilty of a particularly heinous
double murder involving a pickax. But in jail she had a religious conversion
so transformative that she referred to the place where she was held as "life
row."

When Tucker was put to death, there was a mob scene outside the prison. Some
of those who gathered there were opponents of the death penalty. Some wanted
the execution to proceed. And some of the latter group danced and laughed and
cheered and acted as though they were at the Super Bowl and their team had
just scored a touchdown. They did everything but sell funnel cakes. If they
had lived 300 years earlier, they would have happily paraded through cobbled
streets with Karla Faye's head on a pike.

Most people who support capital punishment can't be counted as members of
that sorry fringe mob. But this is one of those issues where there isn't
really a middle ground. Just because the electric chair has been phased out
doesn't mean civilization has prevailed; it only means that people didn't
like how reports of a convicted man's head bursting into flame made them feel
about what they were doing. In judicial terms, Justice Harry Blackmun
concluded in 1994 that all it came down to was figuring out how to "tinker
with the machinery of death."

And he was officially finished with it, writing: "Rather than continue to
coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been
achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and
intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment
has failed." The question isn't whether executions can be made painless: it's
whether they're wrong. Everything else is just quibbling. And most of the
quibbling simply boils down to trying to make the wrong seem right.

********************



DAVID DOW'S IMPORTANT MESSAGE

(Abe's Note:  I agree with Dow that we have to 
talk about ALL of the issues.  He seems to be 
suggesting that the movement to abolish the death 
penalty is focused on just the innocence 
issue.  While it may be that some within the 
movement get much more fired up over cases where 
innocence is a question, I am unaware of any 
state or national group that fails to address the 
full range of issues.  I believe that we can 
touch and move about 75% of death penalty 
supporters, once we reach them.  But every one 
will be unique in what piece of the puzzle moves 
them.  No single one of the many reasons the 
death penalty is wrong will be the tipping point 
for every person who thinks he or she supports 
the death penalty.  Therefore, we must be 
accurate whenever we talk about the aspects of 
the issue, but we cannot ignore any of them - including innocence.  --ajb)

June 16, 2006,  New York Times
Op-Ed Contributor


The End of Innocence

By DAVID R. DOW   (says anti-DP activists should change focus)

Houston

EARLIER this week, the Supreme Court decided, in 
a 5-to-3 opinion, that a Tennessee prison inmate 
named Paul G. House was entitled to prove he did 
not commit the crime for which he was sent to 
death row. On the same day, I received a letter 
from Centurion Ministries, which argued for more 
than a decade that a Virginia man named Roger K. 
Coleman had not committed the crime for which he 
was executed in 1992. The letter admitted that Centurion had been wrong.

These cases have something in common: they pivot 
on the question of innocence. For too many years 
now, though, death penalty opponents have seized 
on the nightmare of executing an innocent man as 
a tactic to erode support for capital punishment in America.

Innocence is a distraction. Most people on death 
row are like Roger Coleman, not Paul House, which 
is to say that most people on death row did what 
the state said they did. But that does not mean they should be executed.

Focusing on innocence forces abolitionists into 
silence when a cause célèbre turns out to be 
guilty. When the DNA testing ordered by Gov. Mark 
Warner of Virginia proved that Mr. Coleman was a 
murderer, and a good liar besides, abolitionists 
wrung their hands about how to respond. They 
seemed sorry that he had been guilty after all.

I, too, am a death penalty opponent, but I was 
happy to learn that Mr. Coleman was a murderer. I 
was happy that the prosecutors would not have to 
live with the guilt of knowing that they sent an innocent man to death row.

The day before the DNA results were reported in 
the Coleman case last January, the Supreme Court 
heard oral arguments in the Paul House case. In 
Mr. House's case, the DNA testing has already 
been done, and it tends to suggest that he is 
indeed innocent. During oral arguments, however, 
Justice Antonin Scalia (who was one of the three 
dissenters when the court decided the case this 
week) argued that disputes over factual findings 
in a case can't be endlessly rehashed.

He is certainly right about that. As Justice 
Scalia has said elsewhere, of course we are going 
to execute innocent people if we have the death 
penalty. The criminal justice system is made up 
of human beings, and fallible beings make mistakes.

But perhaps that is a price society is willing to 
pay. If the death penalty is worth having, it 
might still be worth having, despite the 
occasional loss of innocent life. Paul House 
might be innocent, but how long will we keep 
death row inmates alive, waiting to find out?

In Mr. Coleman's case, the Virginia Supreme Court 
did not address the arguments that he had raised 
in his appeal, because his lawyer had filed the 
papers one day late. When the case got to the 
United States Supreme Court, the court, in an 
opinion by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, began its 
analysis by saying, "This is a case about federalism."

The case did have something to do with the 
relationship between the Supreme Court and 
Virginia's highest court. But is that what the 
case was really about? Mr. Coleman was saying 
that his trial lawyer had been incompetent, and 
that the Virginia courts were refusing to address 
the question of whether his trial lawyer had been 
incompetent because his appellate lawyer had filed the appeal a day late.

Federalism might be a plot line in this story, 
but it hardly seems to be the major issue. When 
the Supreme Court brushed aside Mr. Coleman's 
appeal 15 years ago, the justices said that a 
death row inmate cannot complain when his lawyer 
misses a filing deadline, because the lawyer is 
the agent of the client, and clients are 
responsible for the failings of their agents.

As a result of this syllogism, my client Johnny 
Joe Martinez was executed in 2002, because his 
court-appointed appellate lawyer neglected to 
file a proper appeal ­ a mistake he freely 
admitted to, attributing it to inexperience. When 
the Martinez case reached the federal courts, 
those courts, invoking the Coleman decision, said 
too bad for Mr. Martinez; the mistake of his 
lawyer was attributable to him. I could go on with other examples.

Of the 50 or so death row inmates I have 
represented, I have serious doubts about the 
guilt of three or four ­ that is, 6 to 8 percent, 
about what scholars estimate to be the percentage 
of innocent people on death row.

In 98 percent of the cases, however, in 49 out of 
50, there were appalling violations of legal 
principles: prosecutors struck jurors based on 
their race; the police hid or manufactured 
evidence; prosecutors reached secret deals with 
jailhouse snitches; lab analysts misrepresented 
forensic results. Most of the cases do not 
involve bogus claims of innocence, like the one 
that swirled for 15 years around Roger Coleman, 
but the government corruption that the federal 
courts overlook so that the states can go about their business of executing.

The House case will make it hard for 
abolitionists to shift their focus from the 
question of innocence, but that is what they 
ought to do. They ought to focus on the far more 
pervasive problem: that the machinery of death in 
America is lawless, and in carrying out death 
sentences, we violate our legal principles nearly all of the time.

David R. Dow, a law professor at the University 
of Houston, is the author of "Executed on a 
Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America's Death Row."

**********



LEADERS ON TRIAL IN NORTH CAROLINA

PRESS RELEASE
June 16, 2006

Contact: Beth Brockman
cell 919-824-9283

For immediate release:

Area Death Penalty Opponents to Stand Trial

Thirteen triangle area death penalty opponents will appear in Wake District
Court on Monday, June 19, facing charges of second degree trespass.  Those
scheduled for trial were arrested outside of Central Prison during the last
four state executions for trying to enter the property to nonviolently
prevent the taking of a human life.

Civil disobedience has brought on 55 such arrests during the last four state
executions held at Central Prison.  Those arrested include family members of
murder victims, a former death-row prisoner, college- and high-school
faculty and students, mothers, a pregnant woman, persons who run local
homeless shelters, and human-rights advocates.

Death penalty opponents believe that the day is coming when society will
outlaw the barbaric practice of capital punishment just as it once outlawed
slavery.  Until that day, these opponents believe they are justified in and
responsible for taking nonviolent action-including civil disobedience-to
prevent executions from taking place.

The state has continued its case against the protesters twice already;
during the previous appearance, the judge warned that those charged face
fines and up to 40 days in jail (although NC sentencing guidelines prescribe
a lower maximum sentence.)  Those on trial are eager to make their case in
court and plan to argue a "defense of another," which justifies breaking a
law to prevent harm to another person.  If found guilty, they willingly face
the consequences of their actions.

"The state has no moral authority to take a life, and.the system of capital
punishment is extremely prejudicial towards people of color and the poor,"
said Bill Gural, a 43 year-old teacher at NC Central University and one of
those charged. "I believe that we are acting in the spirit of Dr. Martin
Luther King Jr. by opposing-nonviolently and in faith-the state's
injustice," Gural added.

*************


WHAT'S HAPPENING IN NEW JERSEY?

http://www.youpeople.net/UUADP_newsletter.pdf



SENT BY:

Abraham J. Bonowitz
www.CUADP.org
800-973-6548