9 Oct 2018

Why most of N.C.’s death row inmates never should have gotten the death penalty

by | posted in: Arbitrary Use, Declining Use, False Evidence, Innocence, Latest News, Laws have Changed, but Sentences Remain Unexamined, Mental Disabilities, Partner Spotlights, Public Opinion, Stories | 1

October 9, 2018

After 12 years without an execution, many people believe the North Carolina death penalty is dead. That might be true — if it weren’t for the more than 140 people still on death row.

Our state continues to spend millions every year fighting to execute those men and women, even though the vast majority of them were sentenced decades ago under outdated laws and standards of justice. If they had been tried in modern times, most would never have received the death penalty.

Watch the story of one of N.C.’s longest serving death row inmates:

This week, a new report from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation exposes just how unfair many of those sentences are by today’s standards. About three-quarters of N.C.’s death row inmates were tried in the 1990s, before a slate of reforms were enacted to protect defendants’ basic rights and prevent wrongful convictions.

CDPL’s report, Unequal Justice: How Obsolete Laws and Unfair Trials Created North Carolina’s Outsized Death Row, finds that out of 142 death row prisoners in North Carolina:

92% (131) were tried before a 2008 package of reforms intended to prevent false confessions and mistaken eyewitness identifications, which have been leading causes of wrongful convictions across the country. The new laws require interrogations and confessions to be recorded in homicide cases and set strict guidelines for eyewitness line-up procedures.

84% (119) were tried before a law granting defendants the right to see all the evidence in the prosecutor’s file — including information that might help reduce their sentence or prove their innocence.

73% (104) were sentenced before laws barring the execution of people with intellectual disabilities. Despite a promise of relief for these less culpable defendants, disabled prisoners remain on death row.

 73% (103) were sentenced before the creation of a statewide indigent defense agency that drastically improved the quality of representation for poor people facing the death penalty, and a law ending an unprecedented requirement that prosecutors pursue the death penalty in every aggravated first-degree murder. Before these changes, prosecutors did not have the ability to seek life sentences in these cases and poor people often received a sub-standard defense.

CDPL’s engaging and easy-to-read report is full of facts and true stories from death row that will change how you think about the death penalty. Read it here.

3 Oct 2018

Remaining human in the face of an inhumane death penalty system

by | posted in: Latest News, Partner Spotlights, Why We Care | 0

October 3, 2018

It’s hard to describe what it feels like to be a capital defense attorney. To be responsible for saving the lives of people who’ve committed terrible crimes, and sometimes, to be forced to watch them die. In this video, Elizabeth Hambourger, a staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, explains in moving and personal terms what it’s like to do this most difficult of jobs.

She performed this piece at Poetic Justice, an event organized by the Carolina Justice Policy Center, in which poets, advocates, attorneys, and others told stories of the criminal justice system. Take a few minutes to watch, and step into someone else’s world.

Some of Elizabeth’s words:

I was a 22 year old summer intern when I was asked to work on the case of a man named Timmy. He was scheduled to be executed at the end of that summer … And I went to see Timmy’s family. He had a young son. And I remember sitting in that family’s home and the boy brought out his calendar, like the kind you hang on the wall. And in the square of the date on the calendar that was the execution date, he had written “Dad dies.”

The more I know about the death penalty, the more problems I see with it. But what seems most pressing to me now is that the death penalty increases pain. It’s like a machine that takes this terribly painful human event, and it takes that pain and replicates it and sends it spewing out in all directions.

By my count, I have gotten to know about 20 people living their lives on death row. Under sentence of death, but living their lives. Some have a hard time coping. But there are some who I actually count as role models for me in how to grow and change and deal with the difficult parts of life.

I have one client who writes beautiful essays that he shares with the world by having his friend post for him online. I have another client who helps administer a pen pal program for his fellow inmates.  I have another client who when I met him he wanted to die. Slowly, through artwork and by building relationships with other inmates, pen pals, and his legal team, he has gained the will to live. He had no contact with his mother when I met him. And then one day around Christmas time he heard a sappy song on the radio that made him want to write to his mom, and through that small act of humility he has rebuilt their relationship into something they never had before he went to prison. One client remarked to me that God works in mysterious ways: he had to be sentenced to death in order to learn that there were people in the world who would care about him and fight for him.

See more videos from Poetic Justice here.