Supreme Court DNA Ruling; Study Shows DP Is No Crime Deterrent

THE RESULTS ARE IN.  The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 against prisoners having a right to post-conviction DNA testing that could be used to prove their innocence of crimes for which they were sentenced to prison terms or execution.  Secondly, the world's top criminologists agree that capital punishment does not deter crime, according to a study by Chicago's Northwestern University. 

More information on the Supreme Court case regagarding DNA testing is available at this link:

Supreme Court's DNA Deliberations, by Mary Neal
http://my.nowpublic.com/world/supreme-courts-dna-deliberations-mary-neal

The results of Northwestern's study seems to leave no reason to therefore risk executing possibly innocent people like Troy Davis and Darrell Lomax, two men who were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in a flawed justice system that was proved unreliable by 371 exonerations in the last few decades.

Among criminologists who based their assessment on empirical research, 88 percent concluded that capital punishment is useless in lowering murder rates. 

Below are excerpts from the news report that is available in its entirety at the link.

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

EXPERTS SAY DEATH PENALTY DOESN'T DETER MURDER
AFP
Published: Thursday June 18, 2009     
http://www.newsmax.com/us/death_penalty_study/2009/06/18/226529.html

WASHINGTON — The death penalty fails to deter crime or lower murder rates, according to an overwhelming majority of top criminologists questioned for a U.S. university study published this week.  Just over 88 percent of 79 experts from the American Society of Criminology said they did not think the death penalty "acts as a deterrent," said researchers at Northwestern University near Chicago.

"Our survey indicates that the vast majority of the world's top criminologists believe that the empirical research has revealed (the) deterrence hypothesis as a myth," the researchers said.

On whether abolishing the death penalty could affect homicides significantly, 87 percent replied in the negative — little change to the 86.5 percent in the 1996 study.

In the United States 37 people were executed in 2008 and 32 were put to death in the first six months of this year.

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

HOW MUCH DOES INNOCENCE MATTER IN THE U.S. "JUSTICE" SYSTEM?

Strong reaction followed the U.S. Supreme court's decision on June 18 denying post-conviction DNA testing being held as a right.

Innocence Project :  In a 5-4 ruling today, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that our client, William Osborne, will not get DNA testing that could prove his innocence. The court ultimately ruled that the finality of a conviction is more important than making sure the right person was convicted. Today’s decision is deeply disappointing and flawed.

Los Angeles Times:  The Supreme Court's DNA ruling: Wrong on rights.  The majority opinion by five conservative justice belittles the protections of the Bill of Rights.  http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-dna19-2009jun19,0,2229462.story

Justice John Paul Stevens' dissenting opinion: "The state's failure to provide Osborne access to the evidence constitutes arbitrary action that offends basic principles of due process."

ACLU (In the District Attorney v. Osborne case):  ACLU argues that the Constitution bars the state from imprisoning someone who is actually innocent, even assuming the trial was otherwise fair, and that the state has an obligation to turn over DNA evidence upon request because of its unique capacity to establish actual innocence.  http://www.aclu.org/scotus/2008term/38643res20090202/38643res20090202.html

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

Objections to the death penalty include:

~ It targets the poor
~ It is racist
~ It kills the innocent
~ It is barbaric
~ It does not deter crime
~ It is expensive (Taxpayers pay $90,000 per year per condemned inmate over and above incarceration costs for inmates in maximum security prisons)

Troy Davis supporters frequently cite the first three objections regarding his conviction for the 1989 shooting death of a Savannah, Georgia police officer.  Those objections also relate to Darrell Lomax, a San Quentin death row inmate of 15 years.  Davis and Lomax went through the entire court process as well as appellate court.  Some people might believe that is proof of their guilt, but it is not.  Hundreds of people went through the court process and were wrongly convicted.  There were 371 innocent people exonerated since 1970, including 240 who were freed by DNA evidence. 

Some innocent inmates who lacked the means and/or were denied the opportunity to prove their innocence were executed.  Many other wrongly convicted persons are spending their lives as prisoners.  That nearly happened to Joseph Fears, who spent 25 years in an Illinois prison for a rape that DNA proved he never did.  Fears was finally released in February.  He is a senior citizen now, but the  testing method that was used to prove Fears' innocence was available 20 years ago.  DNA exonerations are published by the Innocence Project at this link:  http://www.innocenceproject.org/know/

In many cases, DNA evidence is unavailable, but a new trial is warranted based on the evidence or lack thereof.  Many people hold that this is true in Troy Davis' case.  Nathson Fields, 55, became the 131st person to be exonerated from death row after a retrial of his case in Illinois resulted in an acquittal on April 8, 2009.  Information regarding innocent people who almost perished in a flawed justice system is available by the Death Penalty Information Organization at this link:  http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-crisis-american-death-penalty

The NAACP announced that it plans to launch a campaign against racism in death penalty sentencing at its centennial celebration in New York in July.   Statistics show that African Americans are more likely to be sentenced to death than other races, a phenomenon that may be tied to poverty as much as racisim.  Public defenders are used in most capital cases against African American defendants.  Sufficient time and resources are usually uavailable for their defense.  For instance, (a) Troy Davis' appeals attorney was siumltaneously assigned to 79 other cases for indigent defendants, and (b) California's budget for public denfenders was so inadequate that Darrell Lomax was forced share an attorney with a man who was a witness against him.

Much has been written about Davis' murder conviction, which was based on witness evidence.  Seven of the nine witnesses who testified against Davis have since withdrawned or tainted their testimony, and there are good reasons to doubt testimony by the two remaining witnesses.  However, the sad truth is that there are many more condemned men across America, black and white, who also have strong cases for innocence.  Some have been denied the right to post-conviction DNA testing that might prove they are not guilty.  Others, like Darrell Lomax, were convicted based on circumstantial evidence that falls far short of "guilty beyond reasonable doubt." 

Many prisoners, their families, and prisoner rights advocates were encouraged when the Supreme Court agreed to review the case of Alaska Inmate, William Osborne.  The High Court's decision determined that post-conviction DNA testing will not be available for all prisoners; the right to test will continue to be decided on a state-by-state basis.  All but four states allow for post-conviction DNA testing, with Mississippi and Oregon being the last two that passed such laws.  However, some states only allow post-conviction DNA testing for condemned persons.  With that restriction, Joseph Fears would still be serving time today for a rape he did not commit. 

In Osborne's case, Alaska argured that allowing Osborne to conduct post-conviction DNA testing on evidence that was used to convict him would cause other prisoners to expect the right to also test their evidence just to prove their innocence, and it would create administrative problems for Alaska.  Osborne's attorneys argued that it violated Osborne's Constitutional rights to withhold a testing method that would conclusively prove his innocence and restore his liberty and persuit of happiness.  Obsorne's test was to be paid for by the Innocence Project, not state funds.  This week in a 5 to 4 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with Alaska.  No Constitutional right to use DNA evidence to prove one's innocence was recognized by the Court. Expediency trumped justice.  Executions and long-term prison sentences can proceed uninterrupted by the inconvenience of inmates' DNA tests, and the court process will remain streamlined as Alaska hoped.  The Innocence Project Resource Center has more information at this link:  http://www.innocenceproject.org/Content/1852.php 

Darrell Lomax's death penalty case is unlike Troy Davis' in that forensic evidence is available, but NONE of it points to Lomax as being the guilty party.  Nevertheless, Lomax was sentenced to death.  The condemned man wrote:

My name is Darrell Lomax and I have been wrongly incarcerated on death row at San Quentin State prison for over 14 years. I was convicted even though . . .

1.   I passed a gunshot residu test
2.   I have an alibi
3.   the eye witness said it wasn't me
4.   the fingerprints on the gun weren't mine
5.   and it was found in someone else's car
6.   the footprint wasn't mine
7.   my witnesses were never called
8.   and I couldn't afford a lawyer so I had to share a public defender with the man who made a
      deal to testify against me.
9.   When the situation with the public defender was discovered he was replaced by a former
      DA who made no effort to find the witnesses for my defense.

A fact sheet regarding Lomax's case is available at this link (pdf-file):  http://www.freedarrell.com/files/fact-sheet.pdf

The study's authors said that if the average time between sentencing and execution was reduced from its current 8-10 years, "there is a reason to expect that the death penalty would deter more homicides than it does today."  That is an unproved assersion.  What is certain is that most people who were exonerated had spent decades on death row.  With quicker executions, those innocent men would be dead. 

More information about Troy Davis' case and the NAACP's campaign against racism in death penalty sentencing is available at this link:

NAACP Launches Campaign to Save Troy Davis and Address DP Prejudice
http://my.nowpublic.com/world/naacp-launches-campaign-save-troy-davis-address-dp-prejudice

Darrell Lomax's strong case of innocence is presented on a website at this link:  

Free Darrell
http://www.freedarrell.com/index.html

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

More articles by this author are available at http://www.NowPublic.com/duo

Your feedback is invited in the rich text comment field below.

Mary Neal
Assistance to the Incarcerated Mentally Ill
http://www.care2.com/c2c/group/AIMI