Trinidad Express
Tobago News
Trinidad Guardian
Fatal flaws
February 11, 2001
By Denis Solomon
NOW that he has hanged enough people to get himself and his party (provisionally) re-elected, Attorney General Ramesh Lawrence Maharaj may have turned his mind to other things, like unseating the President of the Republic.
Or perhaps the latest Privy Court decision has temporarily deprived him of victims. Ramesh has never been one to consider that sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, however many nefarious projects he may have in hand.
Be that as it may, even Ramesh could have wanted no more striking evidence of the evil of capital punishment than the case, reported in the Express of February 3, of a Trinidadian who spent 21 (yes, twenty-one!) years in prison after being falsely convicted of murder. The time Ramesh's brother has spent in a Florida jail is only two-thirds of this, and Krishna Maharaj has yet to be proven innocent.
In 1980, at the age of 18, Collin Warner was convicted of murder by a New York court, along with another man, Norman Simmonds. Warner was sentenced to 15 years to life. Simmonds, a minor at the time of the murder, served nine years and was parolled. On his release, he confessed that he had done the crime alone. A fresh investigation proved that Warner had not even been at the scene of the murder, and the New York Supreme Court overturned his conviction.
Twenty-one years is longer than most convicts serve for murder in other countries, even if they are guilty. Nevertheless, Warner must consider himself lucky in the place and time of his conviction. Had he been convicted in, say, Texas he would have been long dead. New York was one of the last states to re-instate the death penalty after the Supreme Court ruling that made it possible. It did so only in September of 1995, and in fact has still not executed anyone.
The last New York execution was in 1963. There are only six people on Death Row in New York, compared with 448 in Texas, which re-enacted the death penalty in 1974, resumed executions in 1982, and has since put 242 people to death.
Many of these, indeed many of the 697 men and women executed in the United States since 1976, were surely innocent. Warner's is not an isolated case. There has recently been a startling series of death row exonerations, most significantly the 1999 release of Anthony Porter, a man who came within 48 hours of execution for a crime he did not commit. Porter was proved innocent by an investigation carried out, not by the judicial authorities, but by a Northwestern University professor and his students.
A study released by Columbia University Law School last June said that since 1973 87 prisoners had been released from American death rows after evidence of their innocence emerged; this is the equivalent of approximately one acquittal to every seven executions. If DNA testing is allowed in all death penalty cases, the figure may become much higher.
A 1987 study claims that 350 people convicted of capital crimes in the US between 1900 and 1985 were innocent. Some escaped execution by minutes, but 23 were actually executed.
These facts have, slowly but inexorably, brought about a certain unease in the United States justice system with regard to capital punishment. The most striking reversal of opinion has been that of the Governor of Illinois, George Ryan. Ryan, who had spent his political career ardently supporting capital punishment, was so disturbed by what he called the "shameful record of wrong convictions" in his state that early last year he declared a moratorium on executions.
Five other states have also initiated reviews, and in one, New Hampshire, the legislature voted last year to abolish the death penalty, only to have the bill vetoed by the state's governor.
The death-row exonerations and the reviews that have followed have highlighted the range of deficiencies in US criminal justice systems that make miscarriages inevitable. Confessions are extracted by police torture. Judges make improper decisions. DNA evidence proves the accused innocent.
Prosecutors knowingly use perjured testimony. Convictions are obtained on the unreliable testimony of jailhouse snitches who are promised preferential treatment in return for their evidence. Defence lawyers are lazy or incompetent. Legal aid is inadequate or even, in some jurisdictions, non-existent.
All this brings seriously into question the assurance of former Texas Governor, and now President of the United States, George W Bush, that all prisoners executed during his governorship were "guilty of the crime charged".
In June 2000 the state of Texas executed Gary Graham for murder. The evidence against Graham was so slim that a spokeswoman for the European Union, which had tried to persuade Governor Bush to halt the execution, said "We regret that the authorities in Texas knowingly took the risk of putting an innocent man to death". The word "knowingly" says it all. In Trinidad and Tobago, the name of Russell Sankeralli leaps to mind.
No legislative, executive or judicial authority will easily admit outright that innocent people have been executed. But the facts presented in reports by those organs speak for themselves. As early as 1993, a report by the Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee of the US House of Representatives listed 48 condemned men freed from death row since 1972, and concluded: "Judging by past experience, a substantial number of death row inmates are indeed innocent, and there is a high risk that some of them will be executed". For "will be", read "have been".
Some of the reviews in progress in the various states are aimed not at abolition but at the impossible goal of tightening up the system to prevent miscarriages, while leaving the death penalty in place. It is also too early to say that the American public is having second thoughts about capital punishment. But concern has been aroused where it matters: in the minds of the authorities.
In the Caribbean, in contrast, the opposite is happening. The chances of innocent people being executed are at least as high as in the United States. Yet our governments are becoming more active by the day in their efforts to maintain the death penalty, denouncing international human rights treaties for the purpose, and hurrying to set up a West Indian Court of Appeal for no other reason than to free themselves from the limitations placed on executions by the Privy Council.
The implication that the death penalty is necessary to our societies despite the certainty of miscarriages is proof of the contempt our governments have for their people and for themselves.
Ramesh is not the only Caricom Attorney General who is perfectly happy to send a few of his fellow citizens unjustly to the gallows in return for the votes of the bloodthirsty majority. He is just, so far, the most successful.
Copyright © 2004 Denis Solomon