I want to welcome and thank everyone, public and media alike, who has
turned out to commemorate International Death Penalty Abolition Day. I
would like to acknowledge the contributions of the many volunteers
associated with the Tennessee Coalition to Abolish State Killing, Amnesty
International and the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee and to
our guest speakers and performers who have graciously given of their time
to be here with us today.
Today, March 1st, is 155th anniversary of the day that the legislature of
Michigan officially became the first English-speaking territory in the
world to abolish capital punishment.
It is a day to remember the victims of violent crime and their survivors;
it is a day to remember those killed by state sanctioned violence - guilty
or not- and their survivors; it is a day for all of us to examine the very
complicated sets of emotions that reside in the very heart of acts of
violence within our society; and it is therefore a day for intensified
education and action in support of alternatives to the death penalty.
The events that led Michigan's legislators to take the decisive act of
abolishing state executions mirror problems that still pervade the death
penalty system today, here in Tennessee and across the country.
In 1828, circumstantial evidence alone convicted Detroit native Patrick
Fitzpatrick of rape and murder of an innkeeper's daughter. He was hanged
shortly thereafter. Seven years later, Fitzpatrick's ex-roommate, wanting
to clear his conscience on his deathbed, confessed to the woman's
murder. Not willing to accept a systematic public policy that could and
would kill even one more innocent person, Michigan's legislature gave us an
example to follow.
Wrongful convictions are a part of the criminal justice system because
humans are fallible and our systems are human constructs. Since 1977
Ninety-Nine individuals having served nearly 800 years on America's death
rows have been exonerated and released - found not guilty of the crimes for
which they were sentenced to die.
Anthony Porter spent years on death row in Illinois for murder, coming
literally within hours of execution before a court granted a request to
review whether he was mentally incompetent. It was only then that a team
of volunteer journalism students found that someone else had committed the
crime. That person confessed, a miracle in itself, and Mr. Porter was
released from death row. His life was saved in spite of the system not
because of it.
The question of innocence is central in the debate of wrongful
convictions. Since we accept that the criminal justice system can't be
perfect, executions directly assault the historical American notion of
fairness and impartiality before the law. When we execute people we deny
them the opportunity to have their wrongful conviction discovered, to have
their disproportionate sentence set aside, we deny the system it self the
ability to be self-correcting. An individual has the minimum right to be
alive so that a wrongful conviction can be discovered and that person's
life returned to them. If we have already killed them justice, no matter
how tardy, can never be served.
Over the past 2 years the death penalty has emerged front and center in a
national debate over its utility as a public policy. It is this basic
American principle of fairness, of being seen as equal before the law that
has driven this national dialogue, engaged in by conservatives, liberals
and independents alike. The death penalty is being studied by bi-partisan
commissions consisting of both proponents and opponents of capital
punishment because a clear consensus has emerged in this country - the
death penalty system is not fairly and impartially administered!
The Liebman Report found that in the 4578 cases between the years of 1973
and 1995, the overall rate of prejudicial error in the American capital
punishment system was 68%. In other words, courts found serious, reversible
error in nearly 7 of every 10 of the thousands of capital sentences that
were fully reviewed during the period.
George Will has come against the death penalty. Pat Robertson has joined
the American Bar Association, the American Psychological Association and
dozens of other organizations in calling for a moratorium on executions
until the system can be made fair, if it can be made fair. Illinois'
Republican Governor George Ryan unilaterally declared a moratorium in his
state because he knew people were on death row that shouldn't be
there. And now, the 13 member commission charged with studying the capital
punishment system in Illinois has issued a preliminary recommendation to
abolish that state's death penalty.
The Constitution Project, an 18 member Blue ribbon panel that included
Beth Wilkinson who helped prosecute Timothy McVeigh, Gerald Kogan, a former
Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice, and Mike Cody, Tennessee's former
Attorney General, has acknowledged major flaws within the system that
render its judgments unreliable. Those acknowledged flaws include:
The system is racially biased - that is, white victims are more valued
by the system than a victim of color, and in some states African Americans
constitute 75 - 80 % of the death row population
It targets poor people who can't afford an attorney and receive
ineffective counsel (you'll hear about that from Molly Secours today)
Prosecutorial misconduct frequently occurs when evidence favorable to the
defense is hidden from the defense - a defense that may already be marked
as ineffective counsel
Juries are not informed of existing alternatives to death and judges can
overturn a jury's sentence and impose death arbitrarily
Death sentences are randomly and disproportionately handed out - that is,
they are NOT administered in a rational, non-arbitrary and even-handed manner
Tennessee needs to join Illinois and declare a moratorium on executions so
that these systemic problems of fairness can be studied by an impartial
panel of experts. The panel ought to evaluate whether the system can be
made to function so that it does not violate our basic understanding of
America's constitutional promises and guarantees of fairness and equal
access to justice regardless of ethnicity, creed or class. And if not then
the system needs to go the way of slavery and be abolished.
Now today, the preferred method of execution is lethal injection. It is
said to be a more humane form of killing people. But here's the problem
with that characterization. Lethal Injection was developed in 1939 by
Hitler's personal physician Dr. Karl Brandt. It was first used to kill
10,000 "defective" children in mental and children's hospitals in both
Austria and Germany. It was touted at the time as "humane and painless
killing." But it was used to murder Jews and other "defective minorities"
up until the day the concentration camps were liberated by the Allies. And
now, in the United States, we are using this Nazi method of killing
minorities to administer a system of death that is racially biased. If you
ask a WW II veteran if they fought to liberate these camps so that we could
borrow Nazi methods of killing for use in our own criminal justice system,
I doubt you would get many affirmative responses. I know. I've asked my
father who is a Jew, is a WW II era veteran, and has not previously been
opposed capital punishment. Now he is.
Tennessee has had it own dramatic death penalty reform, abolition and
sentence commutation history. Tennessee was the first state to offer a jury
the option of choosing a life sentence instead of death. Henry Horton,
governor of Tennessee from 1927 to 1933, commuted 13 death sentences to
life imprisonment during his term in office.
Prior to WW I, On March 26 in 1915, Tennessee state senator J. A.
Clement, great-grandfather of Congressperson Bob Clement, stood in front of
the Tennessee General Assembly and successfully lobbied for the repeal of
Tennessee's capital punishment laws, a repeal that lasted several years.
The Tennessee senator would not be the last Clement to leave a legacy in
the efforts to end capital punishment. In 1965, fifty years after the
Senator's appeal for compassion, his grandson, Tennessee Governor Frank
Clement, made a similar plea to once again end Tennessee's use of capital
punishment.
Governor Clement, an open supporter of a bill to repeal the death
penalty, spoke the following words to the General Assembly three months
before the House of Representatives voted on the bill:
Because life and death are both God given, the question of capital
punishment cannot be divorced from Christian philosophy - Is the Sixth
Commandment of God meant only to apply to the defendant in a capital
case - Does it not apply to the State of Tennessee? Would any of you like to
have the last word? Would any of you like to say, "Proceed, Mr.
Executioner...Can anyone deny that human judgment is inadequate?"
The bill to abolish the death penalty was passed in the Senate but
narrowly defeated in the House by a 48 to 47 vote. Governor Clement
immediately went to the state prison and told five death row inmates that
he had commuted their deaths by electrocution to life. Three were scheduled
to die that day. When one of the inmates, Rube Sims, learned of his fate,
he said clapping his hands, "Thank you, Jesus. Thank you, Governor." The
others wept and thanked the governor as well. "I can give you life,"
Clement told the men, "but I can't be the pardoning power ultimately."
We need to build upon this history working to build bridges across all
the walls that divide us be they race, class or gender. Events like today
and like the Wrongful Convictions panel taking place Monday at MTSU are the
building blocks to build the movement necessary to abolish what is a costly
public policy failure.
More than three countries a year have abolished the death penalty for all
crimes in the past decade. Over half of the world's nations have now put an
end to capital punishment in law or practice. Just this week Serbia ended
the death penalty.
The death penalty does not stop violence; it's grossly unfair; the system
costs more than life in prison; it's a symbol, not a solution.
We can not bring back murder victims.
We can not legislate closure for victims' families.
Let's not create more victims as a matter of public policy.
Let's prevent those killings we know are scheduled to take place.
Enough pre-meditated violence. Abolish the death penalty.
