From: Andrea Ball <aball001@neo.rr.com>
Date: Wed, Jul 20, 2011 at 8:22 PM
Subject: [bangla-vision] Fw: [StandDown-L] Multiple articles - Continued coverage of EJI report on AL judicial override | The Root - Ifill: Using the Death Penalty to Get Re-Elected | Huntsville Times - Revise Alabama's death penalty law
To: bangla vision <bangla-vision@yahoogroups.com>
This e-mail contains an editorial from:
Huntsville Times - Revise Alabama's death penalty law
Commentary from:
The Root - Ifill: Using the Death Penalty to Get Re-Elected
Economist - Worse than Texas
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The EJI report, The Death Penalty in Alabama: Judge Override, is at:
http://eji.org/eji/files/Override_Report.pdf
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http://blog.al.com/times-views/2011/07/editorial_revise_alabamas_deat.html
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Editorial: Revise Alabama's death penalty law
By Mike Hollis, for The Huntsville Times Editorial Board
Alabama is the only state where judges often override jurors' sentencing recommendations in capital murder cases, according to a recent report, and is one of only three states where judges may impose the death penalty when a jury has voted for life without parole.
This is the main reason why Alabama has the nation's highest per capita execution rate, according to a report by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery.
The anti-death penalty group also says Alabama judges are more likely to reject juries' recommendations for life without parole in capital murder cases when the victim was white.
In Delaware, where a judge may override a jury's recommendations, no one is on death row because a judge disagreed with a jury, and in Florida, no judge since 1999 has issued a death sentence in such circumstances.
To agree on a recommendation for a life or death sentence, an Alabama jury needs a vote of 10 to 2. There are at least 10 cases in Alabama where a judge overrode a jury's unanimous, 12-0 recommendation for a life without parole sentence, said a report by an American Bar Association committee in 2006.
In Alabama, according to a story in the Mobile Press-Register by Katherine Sayre, about one in five of the 199 people on death row were put there because a judge disagreed with a jury. And since 1976, said the Equal Justice report, judges have rejected juries' decisions for life without parole 98 times but only nine times have they overridden death sentences.
The report found that judges are more likely to order a death sentence when the victim is white. Although 35 percent of murders annually involve white victims, white victims made up 75 percent of the cases where judges overrode juries' recommendations. And although only 6 percent of the murders involved white victims and black defendants, "the trial judge condemned a person of color to death for killing someone white" in nearly a third of the cases, said the report.
According to the bar association's committee, Alabama is the only state with such override provisions that selects its judges in partisan elections.
Because Alabama isn't likely to turn its back on capital punishment anytime soon, lawmakers and judges should reconsider this part of the state's death penalty law. Justice demands fairness.
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By Mike Hollis, for the editorial board. Email: mike.hollis@htimes.com
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http://www.theroot.com/views/do-judges-use-death-penalty-get-re-elected
July 20, 2011
Using the Death Penalty to Get Re-Elected
Alabama judges seem to impose the ultimate judgment more often in an election year.
By: Sherrilyn A. Ifill
While most of the country was riveted by the verdict in the Casey Anthony case -- invoking the O.J. trial and decrying what many regarded as an unjust verdict -- the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a nonprofit criminal-defense and civil rights law and advocacy firm, released yet another in a series of reports that clearly demonstrate that the criminal-justice system, especially in the South, is broken and dangerously on the brink of illegitimacy.
The EJI's latest report (pdf) focuses on a little-known practice, permitted in only three states: judicial override. Florida, Delaware and Alabama allow judges to overturn jury-sentencing verdicts in death penalty cases. There are no individuals on death row in Delaware as a result of judicial override, and no judge has imposed a capital punishment override in Florida in the last 12 years. But according to the EJI report, judicial override in Alabama is almost always exercised to impose the death penalty when a jury has recommended life in prison. In fact, although judges have the authority under Alabama law to override a jury's sentence of death and to instead impose a life sentence, 92 percent of judicial overrides are used to order death.
According to EJI estimates, there are 40 men on death row in Alabama who were placed there after a judge overrode a jury's sentence of life in prison. Given that Alabama imposes few obstacles to the imposition of the death penalty by juries (a death sentence does not require a unanimous verdict in Alabama -- the agreement of 10 of 12 jurors is sufficient), and that jurors opposed to capital punishment are excluded from serving on Alabama juries, judicial overrides to impose death are particularly alarming. But these judicial overrides have not provoked charges of "activist judging," confirming that the charge of judicial activism has simply become right-wing shorthand to describe a judge whose independence gets in the way of the conservative agenda.
Among the most disturbing but unsurprising findings in the report are that the judicial override in Alabama is almost always imposed when a jury has given a defendant life in prison for the murder of a white victim. According to the report, in Alabama 75 percent of death overrides involve a white victim, even though only 35 percent of homicide victims in Alabama are white. This coincides with long-standing studies that demonstrate the death penalty is imposed most often when the victim of the homicide is white.
Yet another devastating revelation is the evidence that judges override juries to impose the death penalty more often in a judicial election year. If one plus one still equals two, this is among the most searing indictments of judicial elections (still used in 38 states). It suggests that in some instances, judges, feeling the pressure of upcoming election contests, may either consciously or unconsciously make decisions that will shore up their "tough on crime" bonafides.
It is perhaps no coincidence that in Delaware -- where judges are appointed -- there are no convicts on death row as a result of judicial override. A decade-old study of Pennsylvania judges suggests that there is a positive correlation between harsher sentences imposed by judges against criminal defendants and the proximity of an upcoming judicial election.
The existence of such a correlation in the imposition of the ultimate sentence -- death -- is a devastating indictment of judicial elections. In fact, if judges are condemning convicts to death and overriding the judgment of the jury to improve their chances for re-election, we are looking at a system that can no longer rightly use the word "justice" to describe itself.
To understand the toxic brew of race, the death penalty and judicial elections, one need only read the words of one judge cited in the report, who substituted a death sentence over the jury's recommendation of life in prison on a white defendant because if he didn't impose the death-sentence override, the judge said, "I would have sentenced three black people to death and no white people."
The EJI report is particularly disturbing when read as a companion to the report the organization issued last year that showed the consistent exclusion of blacks from Southern juries in criminal cases. In that report, Alabama once again held a place of special distinction.
Judges ignoring juries to impose death sentences on defendants who kill white victims? Blacks excluded from serving on Southern juries? The charges are lurid and retro but well-documented and devastating. They suggest -- along with the now well-known cases of prosecutors framing black criminal defendants for murders they did not commit and withholding exculpatory information from defense counsel, the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police officers, racially disparate stop-and-frisk police practices and unconstitutional conditions of confinement in our nation's prisons -- that our criminal-justice system is in real trouble.
Where are the congressional hearings on the findings unearthed in these reports and cases? Where is the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which was specifically empowered to "study and collect information relating to discrimination or a denial of equal protection of laws under the Constitution because of race, color ... or in the administration of justice," and to engage in the kind of long-term fact gathering that this very serious problem requires?
Without further delay, we need a federal inquiry into the findings of the EJI report. But we also need a broader, more comprehensive examination of our criminal-justice system and the persistent and pernicious role that race continues to play in how justice is meted out, from encounters with the police to conviction and sentencing.
Whether the inquiry comes from Congress or the Commission on Civil Rights, or even from the Department of Justice, something must be done at the federal level. The U.S. can no longer turn a blind eye toward an uncomfortable but painfully obvious truth: that the legitimacy of our justice system is in deep peril. Outrage about the Casey Anthony verdict would be better directed toward addressing the widespread injustices in our criminal-justice system that have been amply documented by EJI and others, rather than a myopic focus on one admittedly disturbing case served up by television networks for our entertainment.
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Sherrilyn A. Ifill writes about the law for The Root.
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http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/07/death-penalty-1
Jul 14th 2011 | 16:12
The death penalty
Worse than Texas
by E.G. | AUSTIN
AS A follow-up to last week's discussion on the death penalty, I wanted to highlight a new report (pdf) from the Equal Justice Initiative. I hadn't realised this, but in per-capita terms, Alabama beats the notoriously intransigent Texas in both death sentences and executions, and a unique feature of their system is judicial override. That is, in Alabama judges, who are elected, can override the verdict of the jury and change a life-without-parole sentence to death.
Since 1976, when America's death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court, judges have handed down nearly 100 death sentences by overriding jury decisions. Alabama is the only state that allows this. (Delaware and Florida allow for judicial override, but subject to stricter provisions and almost always in the opposite direction—commuting death to life without parole.) "Because Alabama judges continue to have virtually unfettered discretion in overriding jury sentencing verdicts," the report explains, "there is haphazard and inconsistent application of the ultimate sanction." I like Alabama. Lovely state. But I do get a little squeamish when I hear about judges with "virtually unfettered discretion" about life and death decisions.
Would any of the death-penalty enthusiasts among our commenters care to defend this system? It seems a little bit capricious and unnecessary. Surely if a jury has decided that the death penalty isn't necessary for catharsis or public safety or any of the other supposed functions of the death penalty, there isn't any need for the judge to step in and tell them otherwise. As a more general response to last week's comments, I understand the argument that people sentenced to death aren't getting any worse than they've given the world. Still, I think that the state could and should be held to a slightly higher standard of behaviour than that which we expect from people who are literally deemed worthy of being killed like animals. What can I say? I'm an inveterate optimist.
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Steve Hall
The StandDown Texas Project
PO Box 13475
Austin, TX 78711
512.879.1675 (o
512.627.3011 (m
Skype: shall78711
@standdown_tx
@steve_hall
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