Gay Killer's Death Sentence Should Be Stayed
Bump and Update: Eddie Hartman is scheduled to be executed Friday in North Carolina. Media critic and commentator Doug Ireland writes about the case today for TomPaine.com. Take action through Amnesty International and protest the execuution of Eddie Hartman.
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(Original Post: 9/30/03 10 am)
The Charlotte Observer today calls for a stay of execution for convicted killer Eddie Hartman.
Here's this week's flawed capital punishment case: Eddie Hartman, sexually abused so severely as a boy that the prosecutor in his murder trial, hoping to combat any sympathy the jury might have for him, made sure his jury knew he was a homosexual before they sentenced him to death.
And to fully qualify the Eddie Hartman case as one of a long string of deeply flawed cases, the trial transcript shows that the defendant got an incompetent defense from his lawyers. Among other things, during the guilt phase of his trial his attorneys failed to introduce evidence of Eddie Hartman's substance abuse problems, a head injury or mental health difficulties.
The N.C. State Bar recently suspended the license of one of his defense attorneys, confirming what a Charlotte Observer investigative series reported several years ago: Murder defendants often get inadequate defense lawyers, who do an incompetent job representing them during the trial.
North Carolina has been under fire recently for its death penalty system.
The state's record so far is abysmal, as a string of executions in recent weeks has indicated. One case involved a defendant whose trial jury was never informed of a personality-changing brain injury he received in an auto accident. A week earlier, the state executed a man whose guilt was in question, but both the courts and the governor dismissed a signed and notarized confession from another person, now deceased, who was implicated in the case.
Conclusion: "A moratorium on executions is clearly in order."
The Observer also has an excellent review today of Mark Fuhrman's book Death and Justice, on flaws in Oklahoma's death penalty system.
Death and Justice:
An Expose of Oklahoma's Death Row Machine
by Mark Fuhrman and Stephen Weeks
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