Death penalty 'exonerations'
Recently, I made another reference to the number of Death Row inmates across the country who have been spared execution because of exonerations of one form or another. The Death Penalty Information Center keeps this count -- it is presently 133 -- and it has been verified elsewhere in the mainstream press. When I first started using the numbers from DPIC, I conducted Sun archive and Internet searches to independently check the exonerations, and found a large sampling of them to be accurate.
But, at the same time, I think "exonerations" should only be used when a person is convicted but later found to be innocent of the murder that resulted in a sentence of death. That is the popular meaning of "exoneration," and yet the DPIC uses it to cover those whose convictions have been overturned because of legal flaws.
A reader of my column wrote to challenge my acceptance of the word "exoneration" as shorthand for all those who have been removed for various reasons from Death Row. The reader cited a report of a victims' rights organization, the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which challenged the DPIC numbers and definition of "exonerated."
Here is the reply to questions about the accuracy of the exonerations list from Richard Dieter, DPIC director.
The Death Penalty Information Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to research and education on the death penalty in the U.S. We do not have a position on the morality or rightness of the death penalty per se, though a number of our reports focus on the problems in capital punishment and hence have been critical of the way it is applied.
With respect to your question about our list of exonerated individuals, we use very strict and objective criteria for inclusion of cases on this list. Basically, the list is determined by the decisions of courts and prosecutor offices, not by our subjective judgment. As we state in a number of places on our Web site and in our reports, the criteria for inclusion on the list is:Defendants must have been convicted, sentenced to death and subsequently either-a) their conviction was overturned ANDi) they were acquitted at re-trial or
ii) all charges were droppedb) they were given an absolute pardon by the governor based on new evidence of innocence.The list includes cases where the release occurred in 1973 or later, which was the time that states resumed sentencing people to death after the U.S. Supreme Court had struck down the death penalty. The list originated from a request from Congress asking us to identify the risks that innocent people might be executed. The original list that we prepared was published as a Staff Report of the House Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. The list has been favorably referred to by Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and other federal courts, as well as by many public officials around the country.
We believe the term "exonerated" is entirely appropriate to refer to the individuals on this list, which now numbers 133 individuals. Exonerate means to clear, as of an accusation, and seems to come from the Latin "ex" and "onus" meaning to unburden. That is precisely what has occurred in these cases. The defendants were convicted, given a burden of guilt, and then that burden was lifted when they were acquitted at a re-trial or the prosecution dropped all charges after the conviction was reversed. These are not individuals who received a lesser sentence or who remained guilty of a lesser charge related to the same set of circumstances. All guilt was lifted by the same system that had imposed it in the first place. Our justice system is the only objective source for making such a determination.
This notion of innocence, that an individual is innocent unless proven guilty, is a bedrock principle of our constitution and our societal protection against abusive state power. One does not lose the status of innocence merely because a prosecutor or other individuals retain a suspicion of guilt. Of course, it is true that this list makes no god-like determination of knowing exactly what happened in the original crime. Such perfect knowledge of past events is impossible, either to absolutely prove that a person did or did not do an act. We do not try to make a subjective judgment of what we think happened in the crime. We are merely reporting that in a great many cases the justice system convicted an individual and sentenced them to death, but when the process that arrived at that conclusion was reviewed, the conviction and sentence were thrown out. The individual, who often came close to execution, could not even be convicted of a traffic violation. Surely, that should be a cause of concern in applying the death penalty.
Maybe "exoneration" isn't the most accurate word here. But Dieter has a point -- if a conviction was wrongly achieved, our system says that conviction is thrown out and the the justice system returns to square one for the accused. However you shake this, at least 133 people were put on Death Row and slated for execution who should not have been there. These were near-fatal mistakes, in the eyes of our system, way too much imperfection in the area of criminal justice, above all, that requires perfection.
Comments
Dieter's only point is confusion.
Mr. Rodrick, the media job is to be clear, whn possible.
Do your job.
The 133 death row "innocents" scam
Dudley Sharp, contact info below
NOTE: fact checking issues, on innocence and the death penalty.
It is very important to take note that the 133 "exonerated" from death row is a blatant scam, easily uncovered by fact checking.
Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) and DPIC have produced the claims regarding the exonerated and innocents released from death row list.
The scam is that DPIC just decided to redefine what exonerated and innocence mean according to their own perverse definitions.
How Dieter and DPIC define what "exonerated" or "innocent" means.
". . . (DPIC) makes no distinction between legal and factual innocence. " 'They're innocent in the eyes of the law,' Dieter says. 'That's the only objective standard we have.' "
That is untrue, of course. We are all aware of the differences between legal guilt and actual guilt and legal innocence (not guilty) and actual innocence, just as the courts are.
The only issue in the death penalty innocence debate is how many actual innocents are sent to death row and what is the probability of executing an actual innocent. Legal innocence is not the issue, for the simple fact that we cannot execute a legally innocent person. So the concern is over the actual innocent, those who had no connection to the murder(s).
Furthermore, there is no finding of actual innocence, but it is "not guilty". Dieter knows that we are all speaking of actual innocence, those cases that have no connection to the murder(s). He takes advantage of that by redefining exonerated and innocence.
Dieter "clarifies" the three ways that former death row inmates get onto their "exonerated" by "innocence" list.
"A defendant whose conviction is overturned by a judge must be further exonerated in one of three ways: he must be acquitted at a new trial, or the prosecutor must drop the charges against him, or a governor must grant an absolute pardon."
None establishes actual innocence.
DPIC has " . . . included supposedly innocent defendants who were still culpable as accomplices to the actual triggerman."
DPIC: "There may be guilty persons among the innocents, but that includes all of us."
Good grief. DPIC wishes to apply collective guilt of capital murder to all of us.
Dieter states: "I don't think anybody can know about a person's absolute innocence." (Green). Dieter said he could not pinpoint how many are "actually innocent" -- only the defendants themselves truly know that, he said." (Erickson)
Or Dieter won't assert actual innocence in 1, 133 or 350 cases. He doesn't want to clarify a real number with proof of actual innocence, that would blow his entire deception.
Or, Dieter declare all innocent: "If you are not proven guilty in a court of law, you're innocent." (Green)
Dieter would call Hitler and Stalin innocent. Those are his "standards".
And that is the credibility of the DPIC.
For fact checking.
1. "Case Histories: A Review of 24 Individuals Released from Death Row", Florida Commission on Capital Cases, 6/20/02, Revised 9/10/02 at http://www.floridacapitalcases.state.fl.us/Publications/innocentsproject.pdf
83% error rate in "innocent" claims.
2. "Is 'the innocence list' an appropriate name?", 1/19/03
FRANK GREEN, TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
http://www.stopcapitalpunishment.org/coverage/106.html
Dieter admits they don't discern between legal innocence and actual innocence. One of Dieter's funnier quotes;"The prosecutor, perhaps, or Dudley Sharp, perhaps, thinks they're still guilty because there was evidence of their guilt, but that's a subjective judgment." Yep, "EVIDENCE OF GUILT", can't you see why Dieter would think they were innocent? And that's how the DPIC works.
3. The Death of Innocents: A Reasonable Doubt,
New York Times Book Review, p 29, 1/23/05, Adam Liptak,
national legal correspondent for The NY Times
"To be sure, 30 or 40 categorically innocent people have been released from death row . . . ".
That is out of the DPIC claimed 119 "exonerated", at that time, for a 75% error rate.
NOTE: It's hard to understand how an absolute can have a differential of 33%. I suggest the "to be sure" is, now, closer to 25.
4. CRITIQUE OF DPIC LIST ("INNOCENCE:FREED FROM DEATH ROW"), Ward Campbell, http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/DPIC.htm
5. "The Death Penalty Debate in Illinois", JJKinsella,6/2000, http://www.dcba.org/brief/junissue/2000/art010600.htm
6.THE DEATH PENALTY - ALL INNOCENCE ISSUES, Dudley Sharp
http://homicidesurvivors.com/2006/03/20/all-innocence-issues--the-death-penalty.aspx
Origins of "innocence" fraud, and review of many innocence issues
7. "Bad List", Ramesh Ponnuru, National Review, 9/16/02
www.nationalreview.com/advance/advance091602.asp#title5
How bad is DPIC?
8. "Not so Innocent", By Ramesh Ponnuru,National Review, 10/1/02
www.nationalreview.com/ponnuru/ponnuru100102.asp
DPIC from bad to worse.
Dudley Sharp, Justice Matters
e-mail sharpjfa@aol.com, 713-622-5491,
Houston, Texas
Mr. Sharp has appeared on ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, C-SPAN, FOX, NBC, NPR, PBS , VOA and many other TV and radio networks, on such programs as Nightline, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The O'Reilly Factor, etc., has been quoted in newspapers throughout the world and is a published author.
A former opponent of capital punishment, he has written and granted interviews about, testified on and debated the subject of the death penalty, extensively and internationally.
Posted by: Dudley Sharp | July 6, 2009 2:12 AM
You might also want to check out the statement by Dieter about his organization not being one-sided. Everything on the site is bias against the death penalty. There is also a lack of accuracy in many of the statistices.
One is very easy to verify, check out the numbers for the execution of McVeigh and how many people he was executed for killing.
Posted by: KHAYES7356 | July 6, 2009 6:59 AM