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Sunday, January 23, 2011

Pennsylvania should end the death penalty, The Reasonable Doubter's view.

Here is The Doubter's January Patriot-News article arguing for an end to capital punishment.

Last week, outgoing Gov. Ed Rendell asked the Legislature to examine the state’s death penalty with an eye to fix it or abolish it. This half-step toward compassion would have been more convincing if he had not moments before signed executive orders mandating the executions of six of his fellow citizens.

Unless those executions are halted by the courts, these men will be put to death between Feb. 23 and March 8, all of them under a system that the governor recognized to be broken.

One of Gov. Ed Rendell's last actions as to write a letter to the Legislature urging the repeal of the death penalty. In a letter to the Legislature, Gov. Rendell restated his support for the death penalty as a deterrent to violent crime. But the deterrent effect, he said, is mitigated by the delay in carrying out executions. When years pass between murder and execution, crimes and victims “may be long forgotten” and the efficacy of the deterrent “is simply not a reality.” He suggested shortening the time between the sentence and the defendant’s execution or replacing the death penalty with life sentences without parole, pardon or commutation. Additionally, he denounced the customarily lengthy appeals process because it “costs taxpayers substantial money” and robs the survivors of peace of mind.

While I applaud any action leading to the possible abolition of capital punishment, these are spurious grounds on which to oppose it and the suggested alternative is just plain wrong.

First, the careful reviews of death sentences that Gov. Rendell would cut short has proved that even innocent people can be convicted and condemned to die. The examination of hundreds of DNA exonerations has demonstrated the fallacy of rushing toward the gallows and has improved the accuracy of the judicial process.

Elizabeth Loftus, the eminent psychologist who pioneered the study of eyewitness mis-identifications, told me that her work convinces her that the growing number of wrongful convictions of innocent people should make everyone think twice about the death penalty.

Andy Hoover, legislative director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, points out that “there’s really no way to streamline the process to make it shorter because you increase the risk of executing an innocent person.”

What about replacing death with life without parole, pardon or commutation? There already is no parole from a life sentence in Pennsylvania: We are a true “life means life” state. And if we constitutionally outlaw pardons, what do we do for the person who is eventually proved to be innocent but who can’t get into court because that proof comes, as current laws allow, too late to free him? If we eliminate every safety valve for the innocent then the law becomes, in the memorable words of one Supreme Court justice, “too sanguinary and cruel.”

As for expense and peace of mind as grounds for truncating judicial review, it is gruesome to suggest that we ought to derive satisfaction from killing people more quickly or do it to save a few dollars.

America has struggled with capital punishment for decades: whether to have it and how to determine who should die. These battles have been fought largely on constitutional grounds, with proponents arguing that the Constitution implicitly allows the death penalty: just like, incidentally, it implicitly allows slavery and gender inequality. But the genius of the Constitution is that its dictates, like the consciences of reasonable people, can evolve to meet contemporary standards of decency.

In 1994, Supreme Court Justice William Blackmun finally accepted that “the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants.” Retired Justice John Paul Stevens calls capital punishment “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.”

The study requested by Gov. Rendell should nonetheless proceed under Gov. Tom Corbett, who also campaigned as a death penalty supporter. A good place to start would be with the American Bar Association’s 2007 Pennsylvania Death Penalty Assessment report that found a raft of procedural, forensic and funding problems with our capital justice system. The analysis also would benefit from the experience of other states. The Illinois Legislature recently sent the governor a bill to abolish capital punishment, as New Jersey did in 2007.

There are many reasons for these authorities and others to condemn the death penalty. It is cruel and random, it is often discriminatory, its presumed advantages are doubtful, and it places America in the company of nations that we should not want to emulate. But the best reason to oppose it is this: Killing another human being is a wicked thing, we should no longer let it be done in our name.

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The state of the law as a state of mind.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS BY THE REASONABLE DOUBTER
"The Embarrassment of Innocence" Innocence should be the only serious question for the criminal courts. We operate, after all, in a system which enforces a presumption in its favor and which allows any reasonable belief in its existence to preserve it. Innocence is the default state of blamelessness. Because fine and often exquisite distinctions between innocence and guilt carry with them disproportionate consequences — imprisonment, ruin, and death — the stakes are high for drawing these distinctions with accuracy. Public respect for criminal justice as a whole rests largely on the community’s belief that its guilt finding system has two characteristics: first, that it usually correctly divides guilt from innocence; and second, that when that usual result does not prevail, it fixes its own mistakes. The system is not only reliable but it is self-correcting. If it were not, the conventional wisdom holds, its claim to moral legitimacy would be far more tenuous. [click here to read the complete article]
"This Should Have Been a Simple Case: Dretke v. Haley and the Illusion of Actual Innocence" Criminal defense is an always difficult and often thankless job. Pursuing justice by vindicating our clients’ rights appears to many citizens — lawyers and non-lawyers alike — as mere hairsplitting to help criminals avoid the just desserts of their crimes. When we are asked how we can do it, we can talk about the lopsided power of the state, the Founding Fathers’ fear of tyranny or the need to champion individual liberty. But sometimes it is easier just to say that some defendants are actually innocent and therefore it is wrong for them to be punished. This, I have learned over the decades, is the one thing everyone agrees with. If you didn’t do “it,” whatever “it” is you should not be punished. Innocence may not be a presumption that many juries accept, but when some rare case presents an “unusually pristine” example of a defendant being unfairly punished no one should object to his exoneration. Courts and lawyers may contend over guilt and reasonable doubt, but innocence should be the one unbeatable trump to punishment. [click here to read the complete article]

Spero T. Lappas, J.D., Ph.D.

Spero T. Lappas, J.D., Ph.D., is an author, scholar, and lawyer headquartered Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He has earned a PhD in American Studies from The Pennsylvania State University where he researched the relationship between the American law and culture and where he has taught courses in American Studies and Public Policy. He graduated with honors from Allegheny College (BA ‘74), where he was twice named an Alden Scholar, received Departmental Honors at graduation and the Muhlfinger Prize for his independent research and from the Dickinson School of Law (JD ‘77), where he was on the Editorial Board of the Dickinson Law Review, a member and faculty adviser of the National Trial Moot Court Team, and winner of two American Jurisprudence Awards. He was later named to Dickinson's Woolsack Society.

He is licensed to practice law before the Supreme Court of the United States, all Pennsylvania state courts, and several federal courts. He has served as lead counsel in hundreds of major civil, criminal, and civil rights cases, including some of Central Pennsylvania's most important criminal and civil trials. In the criminal courts he has defended several death penalty murder cases, federal drug felonies and conspiracies, federal sports bribery, state and federal crimes of violence, major fraud allegations, and most other varieties of cases in which citizens have been charged with serious state and federal crimes. In the civil rights arena he has represented plaintiffs in cases involving police misconduct, excessive force, wrongful arrest and prosecution, sex discrimination, disparate impact, disparate treatment, prisoners rights, students rights, age and race discrimination, wrongful death, freedom of speech and association, search and seizure, and whistle blowers rights.

He served as an inaugural member of the Pennsylvania Senate Advisory Committee to Study the Causes of Wrongful Convictions and the Pennsylvania Legislative Advisory Committee to study the Death Penalty.

His career achievements have been recognized in many leading volumes and publications about legal professionals. He was among the nation's youngest attorneys to be named in the first edition of The Best Lawyers in America. He has been listed in Who's Who in American Law, Who’s Who in the World, Who's Who in Finance and Industry, Who's Who in America, Who’s Who Among Emerging Leaders in America, America's Leading Lawyers and The Bar Register of Pre-Eminent Lawyers. He has an A rating -- the highest possible recognition -- from the Lexis/Nexus Peer Reviewed rating system.

He has been an adjunct professor at Widener University School of Law and Harrisburg Area Community College, a University Graduate Fellow at Penn State, and a member of the ACLU (where is on the board of directors for the local chapter), American Mensa, and the U.S.Fencing Association. His publications have appeared in the Dickinson Law Review, The Champion (the journal of the National Association of criminal Defense Lawyers), the Harrisburg Patriot-News, The Burg newspaper and the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.

He is a prize-winning photographer whose work has appeared in several galleries, one-artist shows, and personal and corporate collections, a tournament Scrabble champion, and a competitive three weapon fencer.

He frequently speaks to civic and community organizations about matters of public importance. To arrange an appearance, please contact Dr. Lappas at sperolappas.jd.phd@gmail.com.