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  • From: "Common Sense Foundation" <david@common-sense.org>
  • To: common-sense@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Consider This: Death Penalty Flaws Persist
  • Date: Fri, 2 Apr 2004 08:11:04 -0500 (EST)

Consider This...


DEATH-PENALTY FLAWS PERSIST


Critics of a death-penalty moratorium will tell you that the system works.
Those folks aren't paying attention to the news.

Every week brings yet another story of a spectacular flaw in the machinery
of death. Sometimes it's a single case that features a grotesque abuse of
the right to a fair trial. Other times some advocate calls attention to a
larger, more systemic problem that defiles every capital prosecution in
some fundamental way.

This week two cases are in the news, and they show us that in many ways
the situation has not improved.

The case of Donald Scanlon, on death row since 1998, recalls the study
published by the Common Sense Foundation in 2002 on ineffective assistance
of counsel. Scanlon's lawyers were so awful in their work to defend
Scanlon that Superior Court Judge Ron Stephens recently took the
extraordinary step of banning those lawyers from defending anyone else
charged with capital murder.

Reforms are now in place to try to guarantee that indigent defendants get
adequate representation. But people like Scanlon still suffer from the
state's history of providing weak lawyers to defend those on trial for
their lives.

Judge Stephens granted Scanlon a new sentencing hearing, but not a new
trial. Scanlon's new lawyers have found strong evidence that the victim in
Scanlon's case may have committed suicide--evidence that Scanlon's trial
attorneys were too incompetent to develop and present.

If the system "works," it shouldn't be keeping Scanlon on death row for a
crime of which he may well be innocent, particularly when his right to a
fair trial has been denied thus far.

The other case in the news, that of Kenneth Rouse, involves a defendant
who was recently scheduled for execution on April 16. Rouse's lawyers have
filed a petition for relief from his death sentence based on his mental
retardation.

Since 2001, N.C. law has prohibited the execution of the mentally
retarded, defined for the purposes of the law as having an IQ of 70 or
below. Rouse has tested as low as 60.

On Thursday a N.C. Superior Court judge issued a stay of execution for
Rouse, but that decision alone does not remove Rouse from death row. Those
who are paying attention are left to wonder why any execution date was
ever set for Rouse in the first place.

If Donald Scanlon can spend years on death row without a fair trial, and
if Kenneth Rouse can have a date set for his execution despite compelling
evidence of his retardation, then the system is fatally flawed.


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  • Consider This: Death Penalty Flaws Persist, Common Sense Foundation, 04/02/2004

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