Revisiting the Death Penalty Debate

[DanaC]

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.

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.

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.

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.