The Issues We Face: Death Penalty

The following is the third installment of a Left of College Station series: The Issues We Face, an in depth look at the issues that progressive activist will face in the coming year and the coming 111th Congress and 81st Texas Legislature.

Possibly the most difficult task for progressive activist is continuing the movement to abolition the death penalty, particularly in a state that has executed more people than any other in the United States since 1976. There is a particular urgency to this issue; every battle fought is literally a battle for life and death. Organizations such as the Innocence Project of Texas have worked to save lives; Texas has wrongfully convicted 32 people which is more than any other state in the country.

On Friday’s episode of Meet the Bloggers there were several activist and progressive bloggers who discussed the death penalty including Mike Farrell, President of Death Penalty Focus, and Liliana Segura, rights and liberties blogger at AlterNet.org. This discussion ranged from the racial inequality that is present in the justice system to the inhuman and uncivilized nature of the death penalty.

The United States has prided itself on being an example for the rest of the world, yet this country is the only developed western nation that has not abolished the death penalty and finds itself in the company of nations that we often point to as the most egregious human rights offenders. There are four countries that executed more people in 2007 than the United States (42): Pakistan (135), Saudi Arabia (143), Iran (317), and China (470); the United States and those four countries represented 88% of all the executions carried out throughout the world in 2007.

Legislation and the Death Penalty

State Senator Rodney Ellis (D-6) pre-filed SB 167, which would restrict the use of the death penalty from being carried out on a defendant “who at the time of commission of a capital offense was a person with mental retardation.” Texas has executed nine defendants who where mentally retarded, and there have been 44 defendants who have been executed in the United States that where mentally retarded. The Supreme Court decision on Atkins v. Virginia determined that execution of mentally retarded defendants violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishments, however the decision did not excluded offenders with severe mental illness. At 25 least defendants with documented diagnoses of paranoid schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and other persistent and severe mental illnesses have been executed in Texas.

HB 304 was pre-filed by State Representative Harold Dutton (D-142); this legislation would change the “law of parties.” The “law of parties” allows the state to prosecute multiple defendants for the same crime; and essentially allowing the state to seek the death penalty for someone who was party to but did not actually commit a capital crime (similar laws are in place in 24 of 36 American death penalty states). The bill pre-filed by Rep. Dutton would change the law so that a “defendant who is found guilty in a capital felony case only as a party…may not be sentenced to death, and the state may not seek the death penalty in any case in which the defendant’s liability is based solely on that section.” (Section 7.02)

Rep. Dutton also pre-filed HB 298, and this bill would restrict the admissibility of certain evidence in capital cases in which the state seeks the death penalty. Testimony of an informant or alleged accomplice the defendant would not be admissible if it is “given in exchange for a grant or promise by the attorney representing the state or by another of immunity from prosecution, reduction of sentence, or any other form of leniency or special treatment.” Also, statements made by the defendant to another person who they where incinerated with would only be admissible if “corroborated by an electronic recording.”

HB 297 would make the three previous bills unnecessary. This bill which has also been pre-filed by Rep. Dutton would abolish the death penalty in Texas. Dutton introduced the same bill in 2007, HB 745, but the bill did not make it out of committee.

Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (TCADP) has released its annual Report on Death Penalty Developments in 2008, which details capital punishment in Texas over the last year. The report discusses the case of Joe Medellin, a Mexican national who was executed by the state of Texas who ignored a International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling and the pleas of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General Michael Mukasey, Texas lawmakers, law professors and religious leaders. Also in the report where reviews of stays of executions, commutations, death sentences, exonerations, U.S. Supreme Court decisions, and legislative developments. The report concluded that the number of executions in Texas declined slightly only because of the de facto national moratorium that existed until April 16th, and that the rate at which Texas executed after that date appeared to “exceed all pervious measures.” However, the report also concluded that the number of new death sentences reached the lowest level in more than thirty years and those juries and prosecutors have continued to use life in prison without the possibility of parole more and more.