Respect Life
and
Human Dignity
Criminal Justice Issues
Defense attorneys and law students are setting out to reexamine murder convictions in Arizona amid a national debate over the death penalty. Students at Arizona's two law schools are beginning work on the Justice Project, a so-called innocence project started by Phoenix defense attorney Larry Hammond. Working with professional lawyers, the students will review cases of prisoners they believe have been unjustly convicted of murder.
So far, the project has identified 23 inmates whose cases will be reviewed. One of them is Carol Haraman, a battered woman who has served 11 years of a life sentence for shooting to death her former husband. The project hasn't released the other 22 cases because they are still under review. Hammond plans to file an appeal in the Haraman case in April.
"She's been a perfect role model prisoner, but she was denied clemency on what amounts to a technicality," he said.
The Justice Project will not initially handle death-penalty cases, unlike Northwestern University journalism students, whose work led to a moratorium on executions in Illinois. The reason? Death-row inmates in Arizona generally have attorneys and more access to the appeals process. The Justice Project is interested in cases of "manifest injustice," said Hammond, of the law firm Osborn Maledon. Inmates who meet that criteria generally aren't on death row."
Project organizers also fear that taking on death-row cases at the outset could create a backlash. "We wanted to be very careful for the first couple of cases and find genuinely righteous cases,," Hammond said.
Advocates of the death penalty, including Gov. Jane Hull, maintain that none of the 116 inmates on death row in Arizona are innocent or even claim they are. "In Arizona, there's a very careful, precise system in place so if there are problems, they show up and are dealt with long before" an inmate is executed, Hull spokeswoman Francie Noyes said.
Not true, says Hammond, who cited 8 Arizona cases over the past several years in which inmates were retried or released after they were wrongly convicted.
One of the most publicized was that of a Mesa cab driver, John Henry Knapp, who spent 14 years in prison, including 12 years on death row, after he was convicted of burning to death his 2 young daughters. Knapp was released in 1992 after a series of errors, from mistaken memories to faulty science and destroyed evidence, surfaced. The United States is the only industrialized country that uses the death penalty. It has executed 613 prisoners in 38 states since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976.
Since then, 85 death-row prisoners have been released after new evidence surfaced to exonerate them. One of them is Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, a middleweight boxer who was convicted twice of murder and then freed after spending 19 years in prison.
While Americans' support for the death penalty is still strong, there are signs that it may be weakening. A poll of more than 1,000 adults in January conducted by ABC News.com found that support for the death penalty for those convicted of murder fell to 64 % in January, down from 77 % in mid-1996. The poll used random sampling and had an error margin of 3 %.A more extensive poll for Fox News in February, this time of 900 registered voters, found that support fell to 67 % from 76% in 1997. Again, the margin of error was 3 %.
The poll also asked whether other states should follow Illinois by suspending executions. The results were mixed, with 37 % saying yes, 47 % saying no and 16 % saying they weren't sure.
Lawmakers have taken up the death-penalty issue in several states. In January, Illinois Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, declared a moratorium on executions after the cases of 13 death-row inmates revealed corruption, tainted evidence and other problems.
New Hampshire recently followed Illinois' lead by passing a bill in the House of its state Legislature that would abolish the death penalty, although its governor has said she will veto the bill if it wins Senate approval.
Nebraska passed a similar measure in both its Senate and House, but its governor ultimately vetoed the measure.
Meanwhile, a national grass-roots human-rights group known as the Quixote Center has enlisted the support of 768 groups, including 14 local governments, in its fight against the death penalty. Its goal is to get 2,000 groups to join the crusade by the end of the year.
In Arizona, a similar campaign is starting under the umbrella of the Coalition of Arizonans to Abolish the Death Penalty. The coalition's co-chair is Eleanor Eisenberg-, executive director of the Arizona chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"This is a group that feels very strongly that the death penalty is wrong under any circumstances," she said. "The problem is it's inequitably applied, inmates have inadequate counsel or no resources, and it's barbaric."
A series of local events over the next several months will highlight the debate:
Next month, the UA law school is planning a series of activities around the death penalty with its student chapter of the ACLU. The featured speaker will be Sister Helen Prejean, the Louisiana nun whose memoir about death-row inmates inspired the movie Dead Man Walking.
In May, Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights, will be the graduation speaker at the UA Law School. Bright said his commencement speech will focus on the shift in public opinion on capital punishment.
This summer, the State Bar of Arizona will bring national experts to its convention in Tucson to discuss whether there are problems with the death penalty in the state.
(source: The Arizona Republic)
