No State shall...deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.
-14th Amendment
That constitutional guarantee is about to be tested:
Harris County District Judge Kevin Fine is set to hold a hearing in the case of John Edward Green, who is charged with fatally shooting a Houston woman during a robbery in June 2008. Harris County prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in the case. But Green’s attorneys and capital punishment opponents want Fine to rule that prosecutors can’t seek the death penalty because the way it is administered in Texas is unconstitutional. They say they have proof that at least two wrongfully convicted men have been executed. With so many chances for error in the courts, they argue, Texas shouldn't risk putting an innocent person to death.
Every few months, I like to get up on my soapbox and rail against the death penalty. You can read my past posts if you like (I also recommend the diaries of the incomparable Scott Cobb. I make no bones about my desire to see it abolished everywhere (in America, it's unconstitutional; everywhere, it's inhuman).
But I think we all understand that the capital of capital punishment is the Lone Star State, where killing convicts--guilty or not--has become a popular pastime.
This week, Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project (a personal hero of mine) and a team of attorneys will appear in Judge Fine's courtroom and will demonstrate that "Texas Justice" is incompatible with American law. They'll be joined by expert witnesses such as my father (another personal hero of mine, in no small part because of the work he's done on reforming forensic science - see Chapter 5 at that link), who will show that guilt doesn't really factor into executions in Texas.
...
The case before Fine is less about Green than a string of high-profile prosecutions that have raised serious questions about whether Texas has wrongfully sent innocent men to death row. Innocence Project co-director Barry Scheck, who is working on the Green case, says he'll focus on Cameron Todd Willingham and Claude Jones. Evidence obtained before and after their executions, he says, proves that both men were wrongfully convicted.
...
Nationally, 139 people have been exonerated from death row since 1976, including 12 in Texas. The latest man to be freed from Texas death row was Anthony Graves, who was released in October after serving 18 years behind bars — 12 on death row — for his alleged role in the horrific murder of a family of six in 1992. Years after a court ordered a retrial in Graves' case, a new prosecutor in the county where Graves was convicted concluded there was not enough evidence to connect him to the crime.
It's easy to be cynical about this hearing. No matter what Judge Fine says, this issue will be revisited in higher courts, at least a few of which will flatly defend Texas' right to kill whomever it wants.
But let's not diminish the importance of what's going to happen. The death penalty is going back on trial--not just for how it's applied in one case, but for how it's applied in all cases in Texas.
Stay tuned.