A death penalty conversion

In his last moments of life, John Peoples smiled, lifted a thumb toward his brother Gerry and said a few final words: "I hope I've handled everything ... with dignity."

Peoples lay his head back on the gurney. A chaplain knelt beside him and held his hand. Peoples' lips moved along with the chaplain's prayer.

Then, the state of Alabama killed him.

As the first drugs entered his veins, Peoples gasped twice and went still. For the next 15 minutes, as more poisons flowed into his body, the color of life slowly drained from his face.

Peoples was put to death for murdering Paul and Judy Franklin and their 10-year-old son, Paul Jr. Prosecutors said he killed the Franklins in 1983 to get their red Corvette. Authorities couldn't determine how Paul Franklin died. Judy Franklin and Paul Jr. were beaten to death with a rifle.

The family's loved ones and friends waited 22 years to see Peoples die for his crime. Their long wait for justice ended Sept. 22 at 6:27 p.m. Peoples was the 737th person the state of Alabama has executed - the 10th by lethal injection.

"I think we do it as dignified and humane as you can execute a person," said Grantt Culliver, the warden of Holman Correctional Facility and, as such, the state's executioner. "There's no glory in it. It's a matter of law."

It's a matter of law that deeply troubles The News' editorial board. After decades of supporting the death penalty, the editorial board no longer can do so. Today and over the next five days, we will explain our change of mind and heart.

We know that many of our readers, including families and friends of murder victims, will disagree. We acknowledge we cannot grasp the profound grief experienced by those who lose loved ones in senseless, savage killings. We well understand some crimes are so great that those who commit them don't deserve to live in the free world ever again, and that some don't deserve to live at all. Yet we can no longer in good conscience continue to advocate the death penalty in Alabama.

A broken system:

Why? Because we have come to believe Alabama's capital punishment system is broken. And because, first and foremost, this newspaper's editorial board is committed to a culture of life.

Put simply, supporting the death penalty is inconsistent with our convictions about the value of life, convictions that are evident in our editorial positions opposing abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and euthanasia. We believe all life is sacred. And in embracing a culture of life, we cannot make distinctions between those we deem "innocents" and those flawed humans who populate Death Row.

Faith tells us we all are imperfect, but we're not beyond redemption. We believe it's up to God to say when a life has no more purpose on this Earth.

We are not turning soft on crime. Remember, the alternative to the death penalty is not leaving predators free to kill again. The alternative to execution is life in prison without any chance, ever, for parole. That is enough to protect the public.

"We don't have to execute people to prove we are outraged about a crime," said Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama, a Montgomery nonprofit group that defends Death Row inmates.

Even people who embraced the death penalty in the past are having second thoughts. One is George Ryan, the Republican former governor of Illinois who commuted all the death sentences in his state after a string of exonerations. Another is U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum, a conservative Republican from Pennsylvania who has expressed growing reservations about the nation's use of the death penalty. "I still see it as potentially valuable," he said, "but I would be one to urge more caution than I would have in the past."

Some of the most poignant reflections on the issue came from the late Pope John Paul II, who shifted Catholic Church teaching on the death penalty and spoke pointedly against capital punishment.

"The new evangelization calls for followers of Christ who are unconditionally pro-life, who will proclaim, celebrate and serve the Gospel of life in every situation. A sign of hope is the increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil," the pope said in 1999.

No doubt, some sincerely believe executing killers shows reverence for the lives of victims. But how much regard does a society hold for life if it uses the death penalty in a haphazard fashion? This is a crucial question - and one that must matter to Alabamians.

Many misgivings:

While a strong majority of Alabamians support capital punishment in theory, a number of them have misgivings about the death penalty in practice. More than seven in 10 Alabamians strongly support capital punishment, according to a July survey of 863 people by the Alabama Education Association's Capital Survey Research Center.

Yet almost six in 10 among those polled say they want the death penalty halted while the state studies questions of fairness and reliability. Only 47 percent believe the death penalty is applied fairly in Alabama, according to the poll. But the most troubling number is this: Eighty percent of those polled think the state could execute someone who is not guilty.

There is plenty of reason to fear that possibility. In the past dozen years, five men have walked free from Alabama's Death Row - not because they escaped, but because juries acquitted them in new trials or prosecutors dropped charges. Across the nation, more than 120 people have been released from Death Row, some of them having come harrowingly close to being executed.

A startling number of death penalty cases are also overturned because of errors in the prosecution and trial. A massive study in 2000 by Columbia University Law School professors put the national error rate for capital cases at 68 percent and at 77 percent in this state. Incompetent defense lawyers, prosecutors suppressing evidence, misinstruction of juries, and biased judges and jurors led to most reversals, the study found.

Two professors at John Jay College attacked the Columbia figures because the study made no distinction between errors on conviction and sentencing. Even as they estimated a national error rate of 27 percent for conviction, they noted Alabama's conviction reversals during the study period were higher than 60 percent.

Then-Attorney General Bill Pryor criticized the Columbia study because it covered the years 1973 to 1995, but did not take into account cases from 1995 through 2000. During those years, Pryor wrote, "so-called" error rates for each phase of the capital process ranged from 3 percent to 14 percent. But he reported error rates only from each phase of the process, and not the overall error rate, which would be much higher.

When possibly innocent lives are at stake, even Pryor's figures are too high.

Some say overturned cases are a sign the system works, or that it shows how much scrutiny death penalty cases receive. That's true, to a point. But it should be no comfort to death penalty supporters that in the process leading to execution, mistakes are so common.

As a result of these kinds of questions, some states have halted executions and/or embarked on serious studies about the death penalty. More than a dozen states either have done or are doing death penalty studies, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. California is among those just launching a broad review of the death penalty, he said.

Commuting sentences:

The most noted example is Illinois. In 2000, a series of exonerations led then-Gov. Ryan, a supporter of capital punishment, to declare a moratorium on executions, create a study commission and ultimately commute the sentences of all 167 people facing the death penalty in his state.

The moratorium remains in place, and Illinois lawmakers have since passed a number of the reforms recommended by Ryan's commission on capital punishment. Among other things, the state limited the number of crimes that result in a death sentence, improved police procedures, created pretrial hearings to determine the credibility of jailhouse informants, and established a method for courts to toss out death sentences in the interest of "fundamental justice."

At the heart of what has happened in Illinois and elsewhere - including Alabama - are disturbing questions about the fallibility of our justice system.

Cases where inmates have been convicted and later cleared challenge long-held notions about the reliability of eyewitness identification, the use of jailhouse snitches and, in some cases, the integrity of police and prosecutors. These cases highlight other problems as well, such as incompetent and/or inadequate legal defense, and the role race plays.

While these questions apply to all criminal cases, they are particularly troubling in death penalty cases where mistakes can go, literally, to the grave. At the very least, we should be assured the ultimate punishment is inflicted fairly and accurately. That's not the case.

Alabama has one of the nation's broadest capital punishment laws, allowing the death penalty for 18 varieties of murder. Despite the sizable number of murders that qualify, only a fraction end up with a death sentence.

The factors that determine which cases end with death are arbitrary. The prestige and wealth of defendants, the quality of their defense, even the race of their victims can play into the outcome of a case. While blacks are far more likely to be murder victims, the overwhelming number of murders that lead to a death sentence involve victims who are white.

Many other problems exist.

Before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 2002, Alabama had condemned and executed killers who were mentally retarded. Before the high court struck down the execution of juvenile offenders this year, the state had sent people to Death Row for crimes they committed when they were as young as 16. In addition, some inmates who have been executed and others still on Death Row have had histories of serious mental illnesses.

Hit-or-miss lawyers:

Even when capital defendants are mentally sound, they are usually poor. This means they can't afford to hire their own lawyers or mount a vigorous defense. They rely largely on court-appointed attorneys who make less than the going rate and whose skills can be hit-or-miss.

"It's better to be rich and guilty than innocent and poor," said Richard Jaffe, a criminal defense lawyer in Birmingham who has represented a number of capital defendants.

As important as a strong defense is to anyone accused of a crime, it's decidedly more important for those charged with capital crimes. It's not just that the stakes are so high, but emotions are, too. The most heinous crimes often create a public outcry that may tempt police and prosecutors to take shortcuts. These are the cases where people may be most at risk for a wrongful conviction.

And yet, 70 percent of those on Alabama's Death Row were convicted when defense lawyers were capped at $1,000 in pay for out-of-court work - a critical stage of any defense that should involve hundreds of hours of investigation, legwork and legal preparation.

But at least the state has some system for providing for the legal defense, however spotty, of death penalty defendants at trial. There is no such system of assuring lawyers for defendants for the crucial second and third round of appeals where miscarriages of justice are most often uncovered. These cases are spread out largely among a small collection of nonprofit defense firms and volunteer lawyers. Some defendants luck out with great appeals lawyers; others have missed filing deadlines for appeals because they had no lawyer at all. Who gets a thorough and top-notch review on appeals is mostly a matter of chance.

Despite these problems, Alabama Attorney General Troy King said, "We have a system that works as well as any in the world."

At the end of the day, we grant King this: Most of those on Death Row indeed are guilty. They committed vicious crimes, terrorizing old people, even children. They cut precious lives short and forever altered the lives of grieving survivors.

"Those victims have had the most horrible things happen to them, and we speak for them," said Talladega County District Attorney Steve Giddens.

Profound sorrow:

We hear the profound sorrow in the voices of those left behind, people like Judy Franklin's brother Bill Choron and his wife, Gail, who in September went to Holman to watch John Peoples die.

The Chorons believe Peoples died an easy death compared to his victims. "It's not easy to watch a man die," Gail Choron said after witnessing Peoples' last breath. "But it's not easy to think about what he did to deserve this death."

The Equal Justice Initiative's Stevenson argues the question is not whether these killers merit the state's ultimate punishment.

"The question has to be not whether they deserve to die," he said. "The question is, do we deserve to kill?"

The News' editorial board strongly believes the answer to that question is no.