The Cellar - Revisiting the Death Penalty Debate

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Revisiting the Death Penalty Debate

There was a thread recently, about the death penalty, but I can't be arsed looking for it so...

I read an interesting piece in the Guardian today about a man who was freed from death row after 15 years, when he was exonerated through DNA evidence.

One of the things I've often heard said about the death penalty as it currently stands in the USA, is that the appeal processes are too long. That people should not be spending 10 - 15 years waiting to die and waiting for the system to deal with their case. That argument comes in two shades: either the appeals process is too long and acts as a block to justice being carried out against people convicted of capital crimes, that it is used as such by convicted criminals who play for time to push back the moment of their death; or the appeals process is too long and leads to a prisoner being held for years or decades in conditions designed as purely temporary, and which become inhumane when set across a longer term.

15 years sounds a long time for something to take working through the system. It sounds like a lot of stalling and red tape and pointless expense. Surely the appeals process can be made more efficient, can be streamlined in some way. To expedite justice and play more fairly with those in that system.

Except that time doesn't just allow appeals to be heard. It allows the world to change.

Damon Thibodeaux is one of 300 prisoners to be freed in the US by DNA evidence. This new kind of evidence, and new capabilities have proven that 300 capital convictions were unsafe. Had the appeals process been streamlined, had the final decision been made sooner, it would have been made without the benefit of DNA evidence, and he would have ended his journey at the hands of the state for a crime he did not commit.

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Every morning Damon Thibodeaux wakes up in his temporary digs in Minneapolis and wonders when his newfound freedom is going to come crashing down. "You think you're going to wake up and find it was just a dream," he says.

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He walked out as the 300th prisoner in the US to be freed as a result of DNA testing and one of 18 exonerated from death row. With the help of science he has been proved innocent of a crime for which the state of Louisiana spent 15 years trying to kill him.

For those years Thibodeaux was in a cell 1.8 metres by 3 metres for 23 hours a day. His only luxury was a morning coffee, made using a handkerchief as a filter with coffee bought from the prison shop; his only consolation was reading reading the Bible; his only exercise pacing up and down for an hour a day in a the "exercise yard"– a metal cage slightly larger than his cell.

Like most death rows in the United States, the prisoners in Angola are treated as living dead things: they are going to be executed so why bother rehabilitating them? He watched as two of his fellow inmates were taken away to the death chamber, trying unsuccessfully not to dwell on his own impending execution. "It was like, one day they may be coming for you. At any time, a judge can sign an order and they can come and take you and kill you."

At the lowest point, he says he felt such hopelessness that he considered dropping all his appeals and giving up. He would become a "volunteer" – one of those prisoners who are assumed positively to want to die but so often simply lack the will to live. He read the Bible some more, shared his fears with other prisoners through the bars and found a new resolution. "I came to terms with the fact that I was going to die for something I didn't do. Truthfully, we're all going to die anyway; it made it a lot easier."

Had he given up, and become a volunteer, nobody would ever know the truth of his innocence. Nobody would have ever looked into his trial and conviction.

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Also drawn into the fray were a pair of Minneapolis-based lawyers from the commercial firm Fredrikson & Byron. In his day job Steven Kaplan works on mergers and acquisitions, not rape and murder, but he threw himself at the Thibodeaux case pro bono.

As soon as Kaplan began reading the legal papers relating to Thibodeaux's death sentence, he was astonished. He had never worked on a capital case before and, like most people unversed in the finer details of the death penalty in America, had assumed that the judicial process must have adhered to the very highest legal standards. After all, a man's life was at stake.

"When I read the transcript of the trial for the first time, I thought to myself that the high school mock trial team that I coached of 15- to 17-year-olds would have run rings around the lawyers in that courtroom," said Kaplan. "We put more energy into a $50,000 contract dispute than went into the defence at the Damon Thibodeaux trial."

A good man took on the case pro bono. Justice, it seems, is a function of charity.

The appeals process relies on a lot of things, including the introduction of 'new evidence'. Without that new evidence, the old evidence is rarely revisited by those with the power to act.

The crime:

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Two weeks earlier he had moved back to New Orleans, where his mother and sister lived, to help out with his sister's wedding. He started hanging out with the Champagne family, distant relatives, who had a flat in a neighbouring suburb.

He spent 19 July at the Champagne home with the father, CJ, mother, Dawn, and 14-year-old daughter, Crystal. At about 5pm Crystal asked Thibodeaux to go with her to the local Winn-Dixie supermarket but he was busy mending CJ's watch. She left the house on her own at 5.15pm.

When she was not back more than an hour later her mother became alarmed and they began a search, Thibodeaux joining the effort. They called the police and searched through the night and through the following day.

It was not until after 6pm on 20 July that Thibodeaux went back to his mother's house and lay down to rest. He was just falling asleep when police arrived and asked him to come with them.

That was at 7.32pm. At 7.40pm Crystal's body was found on the banks of the Mississippi, about five miles from the Champagnes' home. The news was transmitted to the detectives quizzing Thibodeaux and instantly a routine missing-person interview became a homicide interrogation.

The interrogation:

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It started lightly, then the detectives began piling on the pressure. They repeatedly told him he was lying, putting their faces close up to his. When he gave them the names of the people he had been with over the previous 24 hours as alibis, the officers said they had talked to the individuals who had denied it. "That felt like I was being abandoned, because they were the only people who could put me in their presence away from the crime scene," Thibodeaux said. The police gave him a lie-detector test. When they returned to the interview room and told him he had failed, he fainted.

Several hours into the interrogation, they delivered the coup de grace: they warned him what would happen if he kept on lying. "They described to me death by lethal injection: organs collapsing, the brain shutting down, extreme pain. That's what they said would happen to me if I didn't give them what they wanted."

The detectives who interrogated Thibodeaux have consistently denied using techniques that put pressure on him. But having studied the case for years, his current lawyers are convinced he was subjected to a prolonged questioning that interacted with his vulnerabilities and broke down his resistance. About 4am on 21 July he gave the police what he thought they wanted. He had been under interrogation for nine hours, and had no meaningful sleep for 35 hours. "I had no sleep, I was hungry, I was tired of it. At that point I didn't care, I just wanted to stop it."

He began to confess, repeating details of the crime scene that the detectives had given him. "I'm not the smartest person on the planet, but I was able to figure out how Crystal died and how she was found from what they were telling me. I just put the pieces together and gave them the confession they wanted."

He told them how he had picked up Crystal in his car and driven her to the crime scene. They began having sex, then she asked him to stop and he refused. He raped her, hit her on the face with his bare hand, squeezing her neck and strangling her with a length of white, grey or black speaker wire that he procured from his car.

At one point Thibodeaux told his interrogators: "I didn't know that I had done it, but I done it." Case closed.

Now, pushing someone that seems to be guilty into confessing their guilt is only narrowly separated from pushing someone to admit guilt regardless of the facts. A cop who truly thinks theyhave their man...I can see the temptation.

But when details emerge that cast doubt on the confession, there are two ways to respond. One is to act on that doubt, and the other is to bury it.

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Within three hours of his confession, details emerged that refuted key aspects. Examination of the crime scene determined the cord that had been wrapped around Crystal's neck was a red electrical conductor wire that had been hanging on a nearby tree, and not the speaker wire Thibodeaux had confessed to. Crystal's mother also told investigators within three hours of the confession that Thibodeaux had been with her in the their flat when she called the police to report her daughter's disappearance – undermining any possibility of him getting to and from the crime scene in time to have murdered Crystal.

Further evidence came out that punctured his confession. The autopsy found that Crystal had been hit around the face with a blunt object, not Thibodeaux's bare hand as he had testified. Contrary to his statement that he had had sex with her and then raped her, the forensic examiner observed no injuries consistent with violent rape. More than that, he concluded that Crystal had had no sexual intercourse of any kind, consensual or otherwise, for at least 24 hours before she died.

Here's the clincher, as to why I do not trust any justice system to be bombproof:

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All those discrepancies were known to the authorities before Thibodeaux was put in the dock for murder and rape. They also knew that there were other potential suspects who conceivably merited further investigation.

One individual was a local man with a conviction for paedophilia. Another was a relative of Crystal's who lived in a flat two blocks from the crime scene – a paranoid schizophrenic with a long history of drug abuse and violence against women.

All this was known, but they went ahead anyway. And thatbrings us back to the idea that justice in America is a function of charity.

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Being poor, Thibodeaux could not afford his own lawyer and was assigned a public defence attorney by the courts. His attorney happened to be a former detective who had retrained as a lawyer, and this was his first murder case. At the time of the trial he was, unbeknown to Thibodeaux, applying for a transfer to the same district attorney's office that was prosecuting his client.

"I was willing to overlook the fact that he was an ex-detective," Thibodeaux says now. "But if I had known my lawyer was filing to be transferred to the DA's office I would have asked to have him removed from my case."

The trial lasted just three days. Over the course of it the prosecution tried to explain away the lack of any evidence of sexual intercourse or rape on Crystal's body by speculating that "semen-destroying maggots" had been at work.

Thibodeaux's lawyer, for his part, did not even refer to the confession. "You will read the entire trial transcript and he never utters the word 'confession', as though if he didn't mention it, it would go away," Kaplan says.

If you cannot afford the right lawyer, you do not get the right justice. And what is the impact of a poor defence?

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The jury was out for just 45 minutes before they delivered a guilty verdict. The next day the same jury sentenced Thibodeaux to death for murder and aggravated rape, even though no rape – indeed no sexual contact of any sort – had taken place.

That quickly a man is sentenced to die for a crime he patently did not commit.

The rest of the article is worth reading. The mechanics of the 12 years appeal process, and the various bodies and individuals that made it happen in the end.

But there was one more interesting bit that really caught me. Right at the end it tells us that:

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his 15 years on death row opened his eyes, he says. "We tell the world that our system is the best in the world, and it's not." But he says he still supports capital punishment in America for the most heinous cases – with the proviso that the conviction is sound

That last line is a killer. I hear it so often from people who agree with capital punishment. It surprises me to hear it from someone who has first hand experience of just how unsound a conviction can be. Because, his conviction, as with so many others are considered 'sound' at the time. Who's ever to confidently say today's sound will not be tomorrow's unsound?

His lawyer does not agree, and I will leave the last word to him:

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Not so Steven Kaplan. He cites academic studies that suggest that 2% to 4% of death-row inmates are probably innocent. "If that was the rate of failure of airplanes," he says, "would you fly?"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...-man-death-row

My attention span is not capable of comprehending that.. maybe the laws should be shorter and more to the point...

Except to say: Some times you have to push people over the edge or they'll never learn to fly. The best defence of a public defender is to plea mercy of the court.

When Steve Pemberton was in The Exonerated (shallow reason I know) I went to see it in London. Catherine Tate was in it too.

It appalled me that such miscarriages of justice could happen with no compensation. But some of the stories were uplifting. People who were just glad to be alive.

Wikilink to the film, although I saw the play.

Thanks for the link. Interesting. Bet Pembers and Tate were awesome in the stage production.

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Originally Posted by JBKlyde (Post 842436)

Except to say: Some times you have to push people over the edge or they'll never learn to fly. The best defence of a public defender is to plea mercy of the court.

Paging Infinite Monkey. Paging Infinite Monkey: Your translation skills are required in aisle three :P

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Originally Posted by DanaC (Post 842461)

Thanks for the link. Interesting. Bet Pembers and Tate were awesome in the stage production.

Fan-bloody-tastic.

I almost didn't want to applaud at the end because I was so moved. Of course I "knew" both of them well as actors, but I felt I had listened to their personal stories in a rehab group or somesuch.

It's the wonderful Mr Hislop.

People being executed under the death penalty need only ask themselves "What would Jesus do?" Three days later they should be fine.

why three days later?? I couldn't even begin to imagine the "damning" feeling they would have... kind of like having aids or cancer.. you know your going to die very soon only the meds or appeal process is keeping you alive... recently I've been praying to God and the beginning of my prayer starts with "help me Jesus I'm evil I don't want to be evil turn me from this wicked path" I dunno I feel damned sometimes but at least I'm free to pray.. once in hell there is no way out so you better believe I've been praying for God to turn me and my family and everyone from the evil coarse..

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Originally Posted by JBKlyde (Post 842884)

why three days later?? ...

If a person being executed did what Jesus would do, they'd rise from the dead three days later. :D

oh your joking.. haha...