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New Jersey moratorium legislation moves closer to victory

The New Jersey legislature is poised to move moratorium legislation to victory early next year. The Equal Justice USA Northeast field office has been working side by side with our state partner, New Jerseyans for a Death Penalty Moratorium (NJDPM), throughout the year to help make the dream a reality. The groups upped the ante when NJDPM released a Rutgers-Eagleton poll in May 2002 that shows 66% of New Jerseyans, including death penalty supporters, support a one-year moratorium and study of the state’s death penalty. EJUSA and NJDPM also produced and distributed Time Out: Perspectives on New Jersey’s Death Penalty, a video narrated by Susan Sarandon. Time Out features Garden State residents impacted by the death penalty and state experts in criminal justice, law enforcement, and victims’ advocates. Time Out has been distributed to hundreds of schools, churches, and community groups throughout New Jersey. EJUSA and NJDPM have organized successful community, legal, and religious forums in Newark and Camden and expanded the state tally of moratorium endorsers to more than 180 groups.

All combined, this grassroots organizing push has generated significant momentum in the state legislature. EJUSA and NJDPM, working closely with the Peoples Organization For Progress, the New Jersey Council of Churches, the NAACP, the New Jersey Catholic Conference, and other key state groups, expect to see a hearing on Assembly Bill A1913 soon. The bill creates a commission to study all aspects of New Jersey’s death penalty and calls for a suspension of executions until the commission completes its report. The bill does not legally mandate the moratorium. However, a fall Federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision in the case of death row inmate Robert Marshall has delayed executions in New Jersey by at least 18 months. New Jersey has not executed anyone in nearly 40 years. The court’s decision provides an immediate window of opportunity for a comprehensive study of the death penalty. Organizers are confident that if the bill passes in 2003, New Jersey won’t face an execution before the study is complete. Bipartisan legislative support for A1913 and a ripe political climate make passage likely in early 2003.

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Governor Ryan’s last stand

As Illinois Governor’s term ends, those on death row may find a ray of hope

Illinois Governor George Ryan made history in January 2000 when he made Illinois the first state in the country to halt executions while questions of fairness were studied. The study commission the Governor established completed its report earlier this year, recommending 85 sweeping reforms. So far, the legislature has refused to act on them. Now, just before he leaves office, Governor Ryan has the chance to make history again.

In March, Ryan insinuated that he would not exclude the possibility of “mass commutation” (converting all the state’s death sentences to life in prison). Incompetent defense attorneys, bad jury instructions, lying police informants, police misconduct and torture, mistaken eyewitnesses, and race and class bias are among the many problems riddling the system that tried and sentenced all of Illinois’ current death row inmates.

A kangaroo proceeding

Not surprisingly, talk of commutations has drawn a counter reaction from prosecutors in the state. Illinois Attorney Jim Ryan has gone to court to challenge Ryan’s authority to grant sweeping commutations, but has thus far failed. County prosecutors instigated clemency hearings for 142 death row prisoners and used the proceedings to exploit the pain and loss of murder victims’ survivors. As a result, October was a veritable roller coaster ride of emotional turmoil and misinformation. Two weeks of grief-racked testimonies in front of the twelve-member Prisoner Review Board (PRB) overshadowed the pleas and legal arguments of defense attorneys. Rob Warden, executive director of the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions, noted that the Prisoner Review Board was “not going to give defense presentations any credence whatsoever. . . it has been a horrible kangaroo proceeding.”

During the proceedings, Ryan began to retreat from the idea of “mass commutation,” instead suggesting that he would evaluate each clemency request on a case-by-case basis.

But hope remains that Governor Ryan will make “one last stand for justice,” to quote a November 21 editorial urging a blanket commutation in The New York Times. To bolster support for Ryan to clear the row, state groups have organized several events in November and December. Ryan attended a November 14 event at Northwestern University to salute the students and volunteers responsible for exposing many wrongful convictions. The governor surprised the crowd by announcing a pardon for Paula Gray, a wrongfully convicted prisoner whose conviction was overturned in 2001 based on a student investigation. On November 19, 650 state lawyers signed an open letter to Ryan. Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation has a large pro-commutation event planned for December 8. A week later, the Second National Conference on Wrongful Convictions (the first was in 1998) will gather together dozens of former death row inmates who were convicted of murders they did not commit.

“The Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment already found that everyone tried and sentenced was done so under a deeply flawed judicial system,” said Jane Bohman, director of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. “Governors have long acted as a failsafe against innocent people being executed or to prevent miscarriages of justice. Commutation is the logical and reasonable next step, a simple call for justice.”

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When snipers come home

“You know, they’d come back from war, it might be three months, it might be two years, it might be five years, all of a sudden they relive it again, and all that has to come out.”
– Fred Allen, Witness to an Execution radio documentary

Before police finally caught sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad, there were two theories about who this menace to society might be. Some were sure the perpetrator was a military man, trained to kill without remorse, now back to wreak havoc like Timothy McVeigh and so many others. The homeland security ilk were sure the shootings were the work of a Muslim terrorist, another chapter in post-9/11 terror. News stories reported that Al Qaeda was training snipers to shoot their way through our land, in places like gas stations and Home Depots.

Turns out they were both right. Well, sort of. Muhammad is a war veteran and a convert to Islam. As our nation inches ever closer to a second war in Iraq, it seems clear that our war policies have again come home to roost. As Alexander Cockburn wrote recently in his Nation column, “America is living in the blowback years. What goes around comes around… A nation always on the war path means a nation always under arms, a nation to which war is always coming home.”

Muhammad is not the first Gulf War veteran to be charged with high-profile, mass homicide. Timothy McVeigh became the most famous when he was convicted and executed for blowing up a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds more. This summer, murder and suicide rocked the Fort Bragg military base in North Carolina. Three of the four servicemen accused of killing their wives at Fort Bragg were Gulf War veterans. The University of Arizona student who shot three professors and himself in October just days after Muhammad’s arrest was also a Gulf War vet.

According to a recent Reuters story, researchers are asking more and more questions about the link between “Gulf War syndrome” and these high profile shootings. Although the U.S. Government doesn’t acknowledge such a “syndrome,” it does admit to the pattern of illnesses that have emerged in Gulf War veterans.

Dr. Robert Haley, a member of the research advisory council on Gulf War illnesses to the Department of Veterans Affairs told Reuters, “It’s common for these guys to have become (different). Their wives will tell you, ‘This isn’t the guy who went over. He’s had a personality change.’ And they typically come back (with) difficulty controlling temper, often depressed, withdrawn, not wanting to be around other people, difficulty dealing with complex environments.”

Gulf War syndrome or not, the links between war and violent crime at home are hard to ignore. When you train and deploy young men to kill, at least some are going to become unstable and pose future dangerousness. Cockburn reminds us of the case of World War II veteran Howard Unruh, who shot 13 of his neighbors in 1949, stopping only because he ran out of bullets. “His military firearms training made his ‘walk of death’ the first modern serial-killer case,” Cockburn writes.

On a less visible front, according to Cockburn, a 1999 Defense Department task force found that the number of domestic violence cases against military spouses was five times the number in the general population, with rates among the military rising by over a third from 1996 to 1999. During this same period, domestic violence rates declined in the general population. Former U.S. military psychologist David Grossman told the Toronto Globe and Mail that new programs, now part of basic training, are designed to break down the human aversion to killing in order to make new recruits more effective. “Once this aversion has been removed, it never comes back, and can make it easier for former soldiers to become murderers,” writes Cockburn.

Once police caught Muhammad and 17-year-old John Lee Malvo, the sniper debate found a home in our nation’s other killing field – the death chamber. A macabre battle, dubbed by The New York Times as a “capital punishment bidding war,” erupted between Maryland, Virginia, and the feds. Virginia prosecutors boasted about their state’s execution record – over 80 killed since 1976, second only to Texas. With only three executions, Maryland, where most of the victims fell, just couldn’t compete. Attorney General John Ashcroft settled the argument by turning the suspects over to Virginia, making it crystal clear his decision was based on the state’s ability to execute the juvenile, too. Neither Maryland nor the federal government allow the execution of juvenile offenders.

And so the cycle continues. Death begets death. Violence begets violence.

Before he left his job with the Texas death chamber, Fred Allen participated in over 120 executions, working as part of the team that strapped people down to the gurney prior to lethal injection. The experience was scarring, and Allen eventually had to leave the job. He described how the images of those executed continually run through his head in the 2000 radio documentary, Witness to an Execution: “Just like taking slides in a film projector and having a button and just pushing a button and just watching, over and over: him, him, him. I don’t know if it’s mental breakdown, …probably would be classified more as a traumatic stress, similar to what individuals in war had.”

“My main concern right now is these other individuals [who work in the death chamber],” Allen continued. “I hope that this doesn’t happen to them – the ones that participate, the ones that go through this procedure now. And I will say honestly – and I believe very sincerely – somewhere down the line something is going to trigger. Everybody has a stopping point. Everybody has a certain level. That’s all there is to it.”

Sources:
Alexander Cockburn, “Blowback: From Unruh to Muhammad,” The Nation, November 18, 2002.

Reuters USA, November 16, 2002.

Soundportraits Productions, “Witness to an Execution,” premiered on NPR’s All Things Considered, October 20, 2000.

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Voices of Innocence

A personal face on the death penalty’s deadly mistakes

Pennsylvania is home to three exonerated former death row inmates with a powerful message to share. Thanks to Pennsylvania Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty (PA Abolitionists), the message of those wrongly convicted was heard loud and clear across the state this fall. The “Voices of Innocence” tour featured Ray Krone, a Pennsylvania native who became the nation’s 100th exonerated death row inmate after spending years on Arizona’s death row, and William Nieves, on Pennsylvania’s death row for six years before being granted a new trial. In Nieves’ case, prosecutors withheld the identity of an eyewitness who could have proven him innocent. (William “Hank” Kimball, Jr., freed from Pennsylvania’s death row earlier this year, was also scheduled to speak but missed the tour due to health problems.)

Speaking to thousands of Pennsylvanians at 50 different stops during the 2-week tour, Ray and William shared their personal accounts of living through the nightmare of being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to die. Newspaper and television coverage exceeded all expectations when Ray and William mounted the stage during the Pennsylvania gubernatorial debates on the invitation of Green Party candidate Michael Morrill, a PA Abolitionists member. Standing directly behind the two major party candidates, both of whom support the death penalty, William and Ray held “Voices of Innocence” tour t-shirts while Mike Morrill told the audience why he opposes the death penalty.

The tour closed just weeks before election day, when Democratic candidate Ed Rendell won the Governor’s seat for 2003. When Rendell, a former Philadelphia District Attorney and Philadelphia Mayor, takes office in 2003, he won’t be able to ignore Pennsylvania’s voices of innocence, the human face of the state’s broken system.

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New State by State Partnership

EJUSA seeks donors to support the launching of a new Partnership dedicated to underwriting state capacity building activities. The Partnership provides participants (State by State Partners) with a means to closely monitor and support the development of local grassroots groups working for state legislative moratoriums.

The objective of the State by State Partnership is twofold: (1) to develop a closer working relationship between EJUSA and its donors and: (2) assist and develop grassroots efforts in states most ripe for a moratorium.

State by State Partners will be kept appraised of the status of the activities of groups working for state moratorium legislative efforts, receive copies of EJUSA organizing and training materials, kept up to date on national and local moratorium organizing activities, and if they desire, recognized in our Annual Report. The objective of the State by State Partnership is to raise $500,000 over 3 years through once a year gifts of $1,000 or more. Gifts can be donations made by individuals or organizations.

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Field Office Report: Networking across states the key to success

Covering campaigns in NJ, PA, MD, NY, and DE

The Field Office’s second year started off strong with a multi-state tour of the Journey of Hope…from Violence to Healing, which came through Delaware, New Jersey, and New York in April. To share ideas and get a jump-start planning the tour, Field Organizer Celeste Fitzgerald facilitated a conference call with organizers from all three states. This allowed them to work together by splitting the cost of the speakers’ travel expenses, exchanging flyers, and sharing press releases. This cooperation between the states saved time and money and helped facilitate their working more closely together in the future.

Networking has also paid off in other areas including fundraising, organizational development, legislative strategy, and media planning. A volunteer from Pennsylvania Abolitionists United to Abolish the Death Penalty, for example, attended a recent planning session for the Maryland Coalition Against State Executions (MD CASE) to facilitate an organizational workshop. In the months that followed, state organizations in NJ, NY, and PA have shared ideas on everything from fundraising to organizational strategy with the MD CASE steering committee.

The coming months will provide many more opportunities for the state organizations to work together, and the Equal Justice USA Field Office will be right there working along side them.

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Peak season for executions in Alabama

from Petra Wendeler of Amnesty International, Group 513, Mobile

When it comes to the death penalty, Alabama has never produced the big headlines that Texas has. However, with the fastest growing death row population per capita in the United States, this might soon change.

Alabama’s capital punishment system is one of the worst in the country, says Elizabeth Semel, former director of the American Bar Association. Unlike most other states, we do not have a public defender system. Clear evidence of racial bias in the sentencing exists here as well, and higher courts have stayed all five of the scheduled executions since June 2000 because either the inmate had no lawyer, was mentally retarded, or didn’t have access to DNA testing. Alabama’s judicial system is clearly in a state of disarray.

Further, a fourth of Alabama’s death row inmates are there because a judge has overridden the jury’s recommendation for life without parole and imposed the death penalty instead. A case before the U.S. Supreme Court, Ring vs. Arizona, will challenge the constitutionality of such judicial override and could require a re-sentencing of all the state’s death row inmates.

New lethal injection method

In April 2002, the Alabama legislature voted to switch the state’s execution method from Yellow Mama, an old electric chair built in the 1920’s, to lethal injection. Elected leaders fear that the U.S. Supreme Court could declare the electric chair unconstitutional and Alabama might be without a death penalty.

More than 70 inmates on death row are facing deadlines for their appeals process, and about 40 of them have no legal representation. The change in method of execution from electrocution to lethal injection could further contribute to an accelerated rate of executions.

It’s an election year!

During election season, execution rates traditionally go up in Alabama because judges running for office don’t want to be labeled soft on crime. This year, not only judges’ seats but also those of the governor and the attorney general are up for election. All candidates in this year’s election strongly favor capital punishment and have already announced their intention to widen the range of crimes that receive the death penalty. A representative from Mobile admitted recently that speaking out against the death penalty in public meant committing political suicide in Alabama.

Moratorium – now or later?

Even in such a harsh political climate, growing concern about erroneous capital murder convictions and the awareness of basic flaws in the death penalty process have changed public opinion.

In February 2000, a number of organizations came together to form the Alabama Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. One of the Coalition’s main priorities is to support Senator Hank Sanders’ moratorium bill, which would halt executions for three years while the legislature reviews the fairness and impartiality of the death penalty and indigent defense. Although Sen. Sanders’ bill was killed in the Senate last year, he filed the bill again this year. The Coalition will continue to raise public awareness and educate the legislature. With each new development, there are new openings to take advantage of.

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Connecticut: Organizing under new challenges and new hopes

from Stephen Kobasa of the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty

In May 2001, the Connecticut House of Representatives came within three votes of approving a death penalty moratorium. The legislature did pass a law that would prohibit the execution of the mentally retarded and established a commission to study the application of the death penalty law in the state courts. This commission has begun to meet on a monthly basis, with its final report due in January of 2003.

The seven men (three Caucasian, three African-American, and one Hispanic) currently on death row in Connecticut are all in the process of appealing their convictions and/or sentences. The state is currently seeking the death penalty in 15 pending cases. A skilled Capital Defense Unit has largely eliminated any concern about the conviction of the innocent. Even given a worst case scenario, any execution is at least three years away.

The study commission and the lack of an immediately impending execution has created the sense of a de facto moratorium and a lack of urgency on the part of most legislators. The current legislative session has been almost entirely devoted to budget matters, and the one legislative proposal that was death penalty-related (a new aggravating factor, submitted by Governor Rowland, for acts of terrorism) is not expected to be passed out of committee.

Despite these obstacles, the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty has been closely monitoring the study commission’s work and expects to hear some strong testimony in the coming months. During the upcoming elections, the Connecticut Network is also prepared to raise the issue in both the gubernatorial and legislative campaigns. It remains our conviction that a moratorium and eventual abolition can be achieved in this state.

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Georgia legislature considers moratorium legislation for the first time

by Laura Moye of Georgia Moratorium Campaign (www.GeorgiaMoratorium.org)

Late last year, a coalition of groups including Amnesty International, Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, and the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda launched the Georgia Moratorium Campaign. The campaign is Georgia’s first concerted legislative push for a moratorium, and resulted in the introduction of a resolution in the state legislature on April 2 that called for a study of Georgia’s death penalty.

The need for a moratorium has multiplied since the state resumed executions full force after a three-year hiatus. Once the state Supreme Court rejected the electric chair last year, the state moved to lethal injection and almost immediately resumed killing, conducting 6 executions in just five months.

Campaign success stories

To bolster our call for a moratorium, we organized several events over the course of the legislative session. In January, Sister Helen Prejean spoke to three audiences in the state, including Mercer University in Macon, which drew a crowd of 1,000 people. Several other educational events have taken place throughout the state, including a death penalty conference organized by students.

On February 12, we organized a Death Penalty Awareness Day at the state capitol, where we released new polling data showing that a majority of Georgia’s voters would support a moratorium when informed about some of the problems with the system’s application. Amnesty International commissioned the poll and the Schapiro Research Group in Atlanta conducted it. The results are available at our website.

Over 1,500 people have signed postcards to their legislators as a result of a daily tabling at the state capitol. The postcards are in addition to the over 12,000 signatures gathered on the Moratorium Campaign’s petition. We’ve also continued to gather organizational resolutions and endorsements from organizational leaders for a total of 25 groups and 32 individuals now signed on to the campaign. Among our new resolutions is the Macon City Council, which voted overwhelmingly to adopt a resolution calling for a moratorium on March 19. Atlanta did the same last year.

Beyond the moratorium campaign, activists have had to respond to a number of execution dates this year. The two most recent cases received a lot of international attention and public pressure. Both cases have given us an opportunity to highlight flaws with our death penalty and the need for a moratorium.

Although the first year of our campaign resulted in the introduction of a study resolution without a moratorium, we feel that we’ve made some progress this year, and know that we’re engaged in a long-term process that will ultimately prove successful.

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IL Commission Issues Landmark Report

Illinois Governor Ryan’s Commission on Capital Punishment released the long-awaited results of its two-year review of the state’s death penalty system on April 15. News about the report’s findings is having a ripple effect around the country.

The majority of the 14-member commission voted to abolish Illinois’ death penalty either on moral grounds, because no system is free of human error, or – fitting for its tax day release – because the financial and social resources needed to “fix” systemic problems outweigh the benefits of retaining capital punishment. Unanimously, the commission concluded that Illinois seeks the death penalty too often, which feeds in mistakes.

The panel reviewed all capital cases through the initial investigation, the trial, and the appeals process. The report makes 85 recommendations to insure that the death penalty is applied fairly and does not risk executing an innocent person. But, it warns that full implementation of its recommendations will not guarantee that Illinois will never execute innocent people.

What happens next?

The legislature is charged with reviewing the study and implementing changes that address the commission’s recommendations. This is likely to take time and many observers are doubtful that the legislature will implement all of the recommendations.

Governor Ryan has declared that the moratorium will stay in effect at least until he leaves office in January 2003. Ryan became the nation’s first governor to impose a moratorium on executions on January 31, 2000. He appointed the commission soon thereafter. The moratorium has become one of the defining issues of Ryan’s career, and he is carefully reviewing the report. Some believe that he will commute all pending death sentences in the state before leaving office.

A gain for the movement

Illinois activists are calling on the legislature to abolish the death penalty, while pressuring gubernatorial candidates to support a continuation of the moratorium. The report is keeping the issue alive in the press.

Nationwide, news of the 200-plus page report has made its way into national, regional, and local newspapers, is informing hearings on Capitol Hill, and will likely prompt other states to consider reforms informed by its recommendations. Many of the systemic flaws the study highlights are not unique to Illinois. In fact, many states – notably California and Florida – have been found to have even higher error rates.

As U.S. Senator Russell Feingold, the chief sponsor of federal moratorium legislation, noted, “this is actually the first comprehensive analysis of a death penalty system undertaken by a federal or state government in the modern death penalty era.” Our job is to make sure that the Illinois Commission’s work does not go silently into the history books! It is an invaluable tool for educating state legislatures and governors across the county as we press to halt executions.

Recommended Reforms

  • abolishing the death penalty for the mentally retarded
  • videotaping initial interrogations with police
  • reducing the number of death eligibility factors
  • creating a statewide panel to review prosecutor’s request for the death penalty
  • reducing the use of single eyewitness and jailhouse informants
  • earlier access to a public defender
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