As TChris wrote last night, retired Georgia Judge Hilton Fuller, who once presided over the death penalty trial of accused Atlanta courthouse shooter Brian Nichols, spoke at an American Bar Association conference yesterday and said the prosecution in that case was responsible for driving the costs up.

The Nichols trial should be used to shine a light on how the prosecution's case affects the cost of an adequate defense in death penalty cases, Fuller told an American Bar Association panel on capital cases.

''There's a relationship between what the prosecution spends and what the defense needs,'' Fuller said.

More...

Bump and Update: Jose Medellin was executed tonight just before 10:00 pm. The Supreme Court declined to intervene. His last words:

“I’m sorry my actions caused you pain,” he said to the witnesses present. “I hope this brings you the closure that you seek. Never harbor hate.”

Bump and Update: Medellin was set for texecution at 6pm. No word yet from the Supreme Court which is considering his case. Stay tuned, will update further. [More....]

One of the murderers of Deborah Thornton was executed for that crime. Here's what Deborah's brother, Ronald Carlson, thinks of that:

Wanting to see those who killed your loved ones suffer the same fate is understandable — no one can sit in judgment of those who have faced such loss — but our justice system should not be dictated by vengeance. As a society, shouldn’t we be more civilized than the murderers we condemn? ... The death penalty does nothing more than continue the cycle of violence that is corroding our society.

I have stood more than one time with Death Row families as they prepared to watch their loved ones head to the execution chamber. The pain that they feel is no different from the pain that I felt for my sister. When we engage in the practice of capital punishment, we force more people to suffer through the tragic loss I had to endure. We simply create more victims — victims of the very criminal justice system meant to protect us....

[more ...]

Joe Amrine spent 17 years on death row waiting to be executed for a crime he didn't commit. He writes on behalf of Moratorium Now!, a campaign to bring about a national moratorium on executions. Before advances in DNA technology began to demonstrate the shockingly significant risk that an innocent person will be put to death, Amrine knew that mistakes happen. He's lucky to be living proof of that fact.

We know now that eye-witness testimony, jailhouse informants or “snitches,” and even confessions do not always result in a proper conviction. But what have we done to ensure that these potentially deadly mistakes aren’t made?

Missouri has never had a thorough examination of our death penalty system. The state set me free, acknowledging an innocent man had been in prison awaiting execution for nearly two decades. Five years have passed, and still no study has been done to guarantee that another person won’t be set to die for a crime he did not commit. This baffles and horrifies me.

The last sentence in his essay is inarguable:

The state can always set the innocent free; bringing the dead back to life is outside its capacity.

The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice is trying to understand why California's prosecutors seek the death penalty in some cases but not in others. More particularly, the Commission wants to know if the race of the victim or of the defendant influences that decision.

Since capital punishment was reinstated in California in 1977, death sentences against black defendants, but not Latinos, have been disproportionately enormous by almost every measure: population, homicide rates, victim data and the sentencing patterns of other states. California's 5-to-1 ratio of blacks on death row to blacks in the state population, measured in percentages, is much higher than the ratios in Texas, Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina. The national average is 3 to 1. ...

Twenty-four percent of the people arrested for homicide are black, but blacks make up 36% of the current death row population. Latinos are 46% of homicide arrestees but 20% of death row inmates.... In death sentences against all ethnic groups, 59% have involved a white victim. Yet whites are only about 22% of homicide victims.

Prosecutors have not been forthcoming in answering the Commission's questions. [more ...]

Mike Farrell, the actor who achieved a measure of fame in M*A*S*H, and Don McCartin, formerly known as "the hanging judge of Orange County," team up in this call for an end to California's death penalty. Hollywood actors are often liberal, but why is McCartin taking an anti-death stance?

Don McCartin, having sentenced nine men to death and then watched as the system examined, re-examined and finally overturned all of his convictions while executing none of them, now believes the death penalty is a hideously expensive fraud. It tortures the loved ones of murder victims by dragging them through the years of complex appeals required by the U.S. Supreme Court in an attempt to protect the innocent.

Farrell's point: [more ...]

Recent Supreme Court cases tell us that whether the death penalty is cruel and unusual depends upon the nation's "evolving standards of decency." Here are a couple of questions regarding those evolving standards.

What of felony murder? The "felony murder" rule holds an offender responsible for a foreseeable death caused during the commission of a felony, even when there is no intent to kill. Suppose an arsonist burns down what he believes to be an unoccupied house, unknowingly killing someone inside the dwelling. That's felony murder. Should the death penalty be available when there's no intent to kill?

Jurors in California declined to impose the death penalty on Manuel Alvarez, who "parked his Jeep on train tracks and caused a Metrolink derailment" that killed eleven people. [more ...]

The Onion has its own perspective on the Supreme Court's death penalty jurisprudence. Content warning: don't watch if you're offended by the gratuitous use of four-letter words.

Best read of the day so far....Guest Bloggers John J. Donohue III and Daniel Schuker at Balkanization, Dodging the Death Penalty Bullet for Child Rape, about why the Kennedy v. LA decision, despite it's two factual errors, was the right decision.

I hope someone sends it to the Obama campaign.

Here's further fuel for the conservative argument that no government functions so flawlessly that it deserves to be entrusted with the decision to administer the death penalty.

Since 1978, the federal courts have ordered new trials in 38 of 54 death penalty appeals in California, an unacceptable 70 percent error rate.

By "appeals" the writer is referring to federal habeas corpus review, the right that President Bush and his most ardent followers deem inconsequential.

The linked editorial cheers "the chief finding of the Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice:" [more ....]

Virginia is a distant second to Texas in the number of executions carried out since 1976. The trend in Virginia has slowed recently. Why? Among the many reasons, this one should give everyone pause:

Jon Gould, director of the Center for Justice, Law and Society at George Mason University, thinks prosecutors may be more cautious in seeking the death penalty because he said the state has had 12 wrongful convictions for rape or murder since the late 1990s.

It's good to see a fair and balanced article about the death penalty in The Washington Times. Conservatives do not uniformly support the death penalty. Traditional conservatives have always distrusted government. [more ...]

Philip Alston, a special investigator with the U.N.'s Human Rights Council, has some harsh words for the State of Alabama's "refusal to even discuss the possibility that the state's capital punishment system is in need of improvement."

"(Alabama) officials seem strikingly indifferent to the risk of executing innocent people and have a range of standard responses, most of which are characterized by a refusal to engage with the facts," Alston wrote in the report, released Monday.

The Birmingham News agrees: [more ...]