I'm carrying over the substance of this post from another board where I'm a regular. The original post included an acknowledgement that I've talked about Cameron Todd Willingham in the past; I don't think I've talked about him here before, other than in the chat, but I'm about to. His case, however, is not the main point of this post.

Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 for an arson-murder, despite a complete lack of legitimate evidence that any arson ever took place. That case, best covered in this report by The New Yorker, has so far failed to generate the sort of widespread outrage you'd expect when it's clear that an innocent person has been put to death, for reasons that still aren't entirely clear to me, though I'm sure Governor Rick Perry's success in frustrating the subsequent investigation has a lot to do with it. (The article predates what can only be termed Perry's cover-up. Perry chose not to reappoint the then-current chair of the Forensic Science Commission, relocated its meetings to ****ing Harlingen, and replaced the chair with a man who's now under fire for withholding evidence that eventually exonerated a man wrongfully convicted of murder after he spent 25 years in prison... but if I go too far down the Texas prosecutorial misconduct rabbit hole we'll never get to the meat of this post.)*

Well, now we have an even more damning case. Earlier this week, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review took the unusual step of releasing an entire issue devoted to a single case: that of Carlos DeLuna, executed in Texas in 1989. I'm planning to work my way through the full report over the next few days, but the upshot is this: DeLuna was convicted on unreliable eyewitness testimony and could not be tied to a DNA-heavy crime scene by DNA evidence. That is to say not only that he left none of his own DNA (or, for that matter, fingerprints) at the scene, but that he walked away from a bloody crime scene without any of the victim's DNA on his person. The man most likely to be the real murderer, Carlos Hernandez, was known to carry the kind of knife used to commit the murder, matched descriptions of the suspect better than did DeLuna, and repeatedly boasted throughout the relatively short time DeLuna spent on death row (a little under seven years) that he'd killed the victim and let DeLuna take the fall for it. The Atlantic's Andrew Cohen, in his own summary of the Columbia journal's findings, has compiled a non-exhaustive but independently horrifying list of things that went wrong with this case, that I'll reproduce here:



The bottom line: No reasonable person can believe, having seen all the evidence that was available prior to their respective executions, that both Cameron Todd Willingham and Carlos DeLuna were guilty of murder. We have killed at least one innocent person, almost certainly two, and very likely more unless you believe that we only started killing innocent people after the advent of DNA testing. It's time for those in favor of the death penalty to start telling us exactly what level of error is acceptable if we're to maintain this form of punishment.

*This parenthetical statement was added for the Massassi version of the post, because MacFarlane is more pissed now than he was when he wrote the original.

"100% error. Yee-haw, ah love to see some browns and retards twistin in the wind. My ma's my half-sister."

And that's just the per curiam opinion in Hank Skinner's latest appeal.

How is that, as a species, we allowed capital punishment to exist at this point in our development, ugh.
It adds insult to injury that the richest country in the world still uses it.

Ok I wanted to read about this and comment in a semi-intelligent manner but when I saw 'The New Yorker' article was 17 pages long I lost all interest. In my brief skimming, I didnt see any details about the trial but I'm guessing it was a jury trial. So when you say 'No reasonable person can believe', I'm guessing that somehow a whole jury full of his peers believed him to be guilty. Is the purpose of this post to discuss this case, or rather the morality of the death penalty in general?

At this point I can only shrug and say - "No system is perfect."

What does the GDP of the United States have to do with it? Since when does lots of money = very civilized?

Don't worry too much about the New Yorker article if you want to understand the case this thread is about. Cameron Todd Willingham's execution (while inexcusible) is only supplemental to this thread. The real issue is DeLuna's execution. (This is at least arguably unhelpful, since the full report on DeLuna isn't 17 pages long, it's 451 pages long. If you're looking for a convincing case that a single innocent person has been executed in as few words as possible, the New Yorker article is a much better bet.) But at any rate, the depressingly overwhelming case for DeLuna's innocence is covered pretty well in the pull-quote toward the end of my original post.



So I guess my question is, if we don't have a perfect system for killing society's worst criminals, why have one at all?

Oh, right, there was a question. I'm not really interested in discussing the morality of the death penalty, full stop (although I'm opposed in virtually all cases). No one's clearly right in that kind of discussion. I think that if these cases were tried today, no reasonable jury, faced with the evidence as we understand it today, could even have considered convicting either Cameron Todd Willingham or Carlos DeLuna. Willingham would never have been convicted because there was, again, no evidence of arson. With DeLuna, the defense would have introduced very convincing evidence that Carlos Hernandez was the real killer. Unfortunately, DeLuna's counsel was incompetent, and has a very substantial incentive to argue that DeLuna was guilty because Texas treats lawyers found incompetent poorly.

The problem is there're powerful people in this country (Rick Perry, I'm lookin' at you) who believe that a defendent is guilty until proven innocent, and furthermore are actively and genuinely racist. These people have been around for the past two hundred and fifty years, guiding the nation's criminal justice system, resulting in institutionalized racism that had no valid method of repulsion until the advent of DNA testing in the past 20 years.

Perhaps worse is the fact that, given how human beings are wired, family members of murder and rape victims consider a sentence of "20-to-life" to be no better than a loss, so there's societal pressure to keep the death penalty around.

-I would argue there are some people out there who deserve to die, but the cost to execute a person is already so high, the savings versus just leaving them in prison for life don't really add up. Add to that the fact that it's impossible to un-execute an innocent person but entirely possible to free them from prison, and there's really no valid reason to keep the death penalty around.

Those look like some cases where your right, they were innocent and CERTAINLY should not have been executed. It always seems that when cases are botched this badly, people know about it. People within the justice system that is. If someone receives 3 consecutive life sentences or the death penalty and there are people who know the case was botched and are covering it up, its not likely the convicted person will ever be exonerated. at least not while the people who put him/her away are alive or still care enough to maintain a cover-up. Of course this only really applies if a case was botched AND is being covered up. Not saying that makes everything ok, just one more thing to consider.


Just out of curiosity what happens to inmates when death penalty is abolished in a state?
do they just get placed in a maximum security prison with general population?

Actually, they're still put to death. Pretty ****ed up, right?

I'm against the whole correctional/punishment system in general. The government is the last thing I want doling out judgement and punishment with my buck in my name. The only legitimacy to locking human beings up like animals is that they're detrimental to society. All other arguments are pandering and ignorant of reality. "Correction" as in gang training. "Punishment" as in revenge. We cannot claim moral superiority when doing the things we would hold others accountable for. Eye for an eye makes an ass out of everyone.

incidentally i really do think there should be a special streamlined death penalty for anyone caught molesting/raping children.

See, this is where I really have a problem. You don't think there's probably a reason, however inexcusable, for seeing children in sexual ways? When I say this, it's easy to construe my opinion as sympathy, which I don't. I simply think that empathy is a far more effective treatment of the problems in society. Understanding these people is far more important to me than punishing them. I'd rather we prevent future incidences of these cases than enact "justice." I'm not saying I wouldn't want to gut a baby rapist, but I just don't think, as a society, that it's effectively saving anyone to do so.

i think you lose the moral high ground when you kill someone for killing someone. Obviously there are those who are going to disagree, especially in extreme cases like treason.

heres why i think it IS an effective way of saving people. most pedophiles WILL be repeat offenders. For me even though i have no sympathy for someone who molests a child, it is MUCH more about preventing another child from being abused by the same person than it is about revenge or anything like that. This is not an emotional knee jerk reaction.

but in answer to your question, yeah of course there is probably a "reason" that people become child molesters. probably a complex combination of environmental factor and chemical imbalances or something. And i agree every effort should be made to understand pedophiles, maybe... MAYBE something can be done to change mindset/behavior??

but in the meantime im still fine with expedited executions.

Doesn't the death penalty end up costing taxpayers significantly more than life in prison? I'm all for the cheaper, undoable option.

You want to circumvent the justice system just because you don't like the nature of a particular crime? What a terrible idea.

Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.

+1

NOOOOOOPEEEEE. i think there should be a framework WITHIN the justice system to streamline the death penalty for anyone who is convicted of raping a child.

you see "circumvent" would imply going around the justice system. NOT what i said.

but, you are correct, circumventing the justice system would be a terrible idea.

...so what is "streamlining"? Making it go faster? Bypassing the appeals process? Why do you care, let them rot.

i dont want to have to pay for their time spent rotting

also im willing to admit. I have no idea how one would go about streamlining the appeals/death row process(in regards to what we were just talking about). I dont even know if its possible. But, i there is a way, then im for it.

So you want to hasten the execution of possibly innocent people, reduce their chances of proving their innocence or breaking the case presented against them, and are willing to spend more money in the process while insisting it's somehow cheaper to execute someone than it is to keep them alive?

-Seems inefficient. Besides, one does not get to decide how their tax dollars are spent, otherwise there would be no war or social security or FBI or disability or nuclear stockpile or national parks. Which would probably suck.

Darth_Alran, in this thread about wrongful convictions causing the murders of innocent people, with an idea to make the death penalty faster and cheaper for certain convicts.

Someone doesn't get the point of this thread.

There wasn't a genuine cover-up in the Cameron Todd Willingham case until after his execution. Willingham had a terrible lawyer who failed to contest any of the superstition the state passed off as fire science. As a result, the jury concluded that an arson had taken place, and having taken that on faith, Willingham was the only conceivable culprit. Actual fire scientist Dr. Craig Beyler compiled a report on the errors made by the arson investigators in Willingham's case shortly before his execution; it was almost certainly not even read. It's not that it was hushed or hidden, it was simply ignored by the governor, the one remaining person who had the power to stop Willingham's execution. And that's really all anyone ever needs to know about Rick Perry: this is a man who doesn't care whether the execution orders he signs are for innocent people or guilty ones -- he admitted in a debate last year that he hasn't lost a moment's sleep over the question. But at any rate, the coverup started in response to the Texas Forensic Science Commission's investigation of the case, which Perry perceived to be a political threat in an election year.

I don't think you could say there was a coverup of any sort in the Carlos DeLuna case. Just incompetence, indifference, and a sort of institutional inertia among judges and prosecutors when it comes to questioning their immediate impressions of a case.



There's no hard and fast rule. It's not necessarily true that current death row inmates are executed after a state abolishes the death penalty; Governor Pat Quinn of Illinois signed a bill abolishing that state's death penalty last year and commuted the sentences of every prisoner serving on death row at the time to life without parole. A state might very well also, as JediKirby suggested, abolish the death penalty but still carry out the sentences of inmates already sentenced to death. I don't know of an actual example of this, but perhaps JediKirby does.

I'll try to answer this in terms of the penal system I'm most familiar with. If Texas were forced by some Supreme Court ruling to abolish the death penalty, I expect they'd continue to maintain the existing death row facility (the Polunsky Unit in Huntsville, TX) as a maximum security prison for inmates convicted of capital murder. Inmates at the Polunsky unit are kept in their individual cells 23 hours a day unless they have visitors, with one hour of isolated recreation. These procedures would probably not change just because the inmates could no longer be executed.



As far as I'm aware, this is just about universally accepted as true.

Re: Child molestation and "streamlining." As of Kennedy v. Louisiana in 2008, the Eighth Amendment does not permit execution as a punishment for rape of a child.* Alran's kind of obliquely brought up another interesting point though. Now, Alran, I assume that when you talk about offenders who are "caught molesting ... children," you're using the word caught intentionally. That is to say, we're talking about someone who was caught in the act and is pretty much irrefutably guilty, and we're interested in limiting his obviously fruitless appeals. Disregarding the legal impossibility of executing child molesters, I've heard a similar sentiment expressed about obviously guilty murders. And fortunately, we already have a mechanism for this: the doctrine of harmless error. Not to get too technical, if the evidence or judicial error or what have you that the inmate's appeal is based on obviously would not have changed the outcome of the case, the appeal will be dismissed.

*The Supreme Court ruled out execution for rape of an adult in Coker v. Georgia in 1977. The only remaining capital crimes are murder (but not all murder), treason, and, under some narrow circumstances defined by statute, espionage. (It's unclear whether a death sentence for espionage would be upheld after Kennedy, and I was kind of perversely hoping Bradley Manning's prosecutors would seek the death penalty so we'd have a test case.)

well... then i stand corrected.

I'd rather be executed than be wrongfully imprisoned for a godawful amount of time. No question.

Edit: in case any of you interpret that statement the wrong way—which you will—it isn't an argument for the death penalty. It's an argument against egregious incarceration. (I won't even get started on the ballooning incarceration rate in the U.S. or the trend of privatization and slave labor.)

The recently passed repeal of Connecticut's capital punishment law included a specific contingency that the past 10 or 11 cases would not be retroactively overturned, and the convicted would still be put to death. Several states have attempted to overturn capital punishment, but were specifically vetoed because they included retroactive life sentences for current death row inmates. Governors are afraid their opponents will cite their signing of the bill as a pardon of potentially famous crimes that the community had rallied against.

Not to agree with Tibby because it pains me to do so, but generally, empirically, GDP per capita is correlated pretty well with things that we'd consider "very civilized" (health outcomes, education outcomes, environmental outcomes, institutions, etc). As you get richer you start having more time to worry about other **** rather than solely your own survival.

I remember a news story, not long ago, about a man convicted of raping and killing a little girl. He was found to have been innocent by dna testing. But, yeah, he should have been executed real quick.

This story? I'd heard about it last year on public radio one day in the car, but didn't keep track of it's development. I'm glad to see that he's out of prison.

U sure that's always a plus?? What about this guy!

Isnt that Robert DeNiro?

No, that's Bob Hoskins.

Yeah. In Cape Fear (the remake) his character was convicted and incarcerated despite evidence that his rape victim was promiscuous, a piece of evidence his public defender "buried". When he got out of prison he decides to stalk and kill the public defender and his family.

Spoilers: He's the bad guy

I'll let Mr. MacFarlane address your concerns on this issue.

Caught in the act by who? How does a witness equal irrefutably guilty? How do we know the witness is telling the truth? I'm not sure there could be such a thing as irrefutably guilty in a court of law.