Innocents on Death Row: Who’s counting?
John Holdridge, who argued State v. Courchesne last month before the (CT) Supreme Court, has this opinion piece at HuffPo, arguing that the number of exonerations from death row make a strong case for a moratorium on the death penalty.
One of the primary reasons is the recent explosion in the number of death-row exonerations, which the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) now puts at 127. In response, some proponents of capital punishment have taken to arguing that many of the freed death-row prisoners are not in fact innocent.
The rest of the article is a good read (or riddled with inaccuracies, if you’re a proponent), but this last sentence piqued my curiosity. What do you consider to be “innocence”, when talking about exonerations? Do you restrict this definition to factual innocence or should it include legal innocence as well?
The DPIC number comes from the inclusive definition of “innocence”. I take factual innocence to mean that there is no credible evidence of an individual’s guilt. How is this different from legal innocence and why is such a distinction necessary or even worthwhile?
In 2005 testimony before Congress, [Oregon prosecutor Joshua] Marquis submitted a document [PDF ]which denied that my former client, Michael Ray Graham, and his co-defendant Albert Burrell were released from Louisiana’s death row because they were innocent. The author of the document claimed that they were released “only because there was insufficient evidence of guilt.” In fact, Graham and Burrell were released after the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office informed a court that there was “a total lack of credible evidence linking Graham and/or Burrell to the crime.”
So, what do you think?
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about 2 years ago
The reason it matters is that we’re after truth. And, to the extent that people who “did it” get off death row, the procedural liberality of the system is used to indict the system. There’s a difference between Kirk Bloodworth and Jeremy Sheets, and it’s the height of sophistry to ignore that difference.
about 2 years ago
Oh dear, Josh Marquis from my neck of the woods strikes again.
He once told me that the death penalty in Oregon is being administered fairly because there isn’t a single one of the inmates on death row asserting their innocence.
What he failed to take into account is that Oregon’s death penalty was only reinstated (after a tortured path) in 1984. See “A Tortured History: The Story of Capital Punishment in Oregon” by William R. Long.
While it seems that 1984 was a long time ago (not so long for some of us), the number of legal challenges to death cases at both the state and federal levels means that the inmates who will, as a last resort, assert their innocence have not gotten to that stage yet!
So, my response to dear Josh is to quit using spurious arguments to make his case and to wait. I have personally represented two clients in this state on death row who will, sooner or later, begin asserting their actual innocence.
Then, Josh will see the storm land on his own door step.