Slowness of system allows convict to escape death penalty

[JollyRoger]

The convictions of two mentally disabled half-brothers were vacated and the two men were ordered released by Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser in North Carolina on Tuesday. They were freed from prison Wednesday. Henry Lee McCollum, 50, had been on death row for 30 years, longer than anyone else in North Carolina history. He and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, were convicted for the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. DNA evidence implicated another man, a known sex offender the police had not investigated, despite the fact that he lived next to the crime scene. McCollum and Brown were 19 and 15 at the time local police were investigating the murder of Sabrina Buie. Both confessed to the crime after lengthy police interrogations. They recanted shortly after—in fact McCollum has recanted 226 times—but were convicted, largely on the basis of the false confessions, even though no physical evidence connected them to the crime scene. Police also hid exculpatory evidence for years.

This case highlights the same well-known and extensively documented problems that can lead to false arrests and convictions: Police who are incentivized to find any suspect quickly, rather than the right one carefully; false confessions elicited after improper questioning; exculpatory evidence never turned over; the prosecution of vulnerable, mentally ill, or very young suspects in ways that take advantage of their innocence rather than protecting it; prosecutorial zeal that has far more to do with the pursuit of victories than the pursuit of truth; and a death penalty appeals system that treats this entire screwed-up process of investigation and conviction as both conclusive and unreviewable.

As the New York Times notes, as recently as 2010, the North Carolina Republican Party featured McCollum’s booking photo on campaign fliers accusing a local Democrat of being soft on crime

It never fails to astonish me that the same conservatives who argue that every last aspect of big government is irreparably broken and corrupt inevitably see a capital punishment system that is perfect and just. If you genuinely believe that the state can’t even fix a pothole without self-dealing and corruption, how is it possible to imagine that police departments and prosecutors’ offices are beyond suspicion, even though they are subject to immeasurable political pressure to wrap up cases, even when the evidence is shaky and ill-gotten, and even as there are other avenues that have gone unexplored?

Those who believe that we don’t execute the undeserving in America—or who aren’t too concerned about that possibility anyhow—have an ally in Justice Antonin Scalia.

That same Scalia, in an unrelated case before the Supreme Court 20 years ago, name-checked McCollum as the reason to continue to impose the death penalty.

Several years after he baited Blackmun over McCollum, Scalia floated the notion that executing even innocents doesn’t violate the Constitution. After the court ordered a retrial in a controversial capital case, Scalia wrote for himself and Justice Clarence Thomas, that “[t]his court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent.”

It was once the case that McCollum was held out, to the collective members of the Supreme Court, as the very worst of the worst, deserving of death because of the heinousness of his crimes. Having shown that he never committed that crime, it seems high time to ask whether, in the view of some Supreme Court justices, that would have even made a difference had we executed him.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/09/henry_lee_mccollum_cleared_by_dna_evidence_in_north_carolina_after_spending.single.html

After a case like this, I am interested to hear why we should trust government bureaucrats (and often union members) when it comes to influencing whether one of us should be executed?

 

[Cutlass]

Not to mention the lawyers....


The weakness of the criminal justice system is one of the best arguments against the death penalty.

 

[Zack]

To speed up the process, I propose the judge executes the convict on the spot. Like in Dredd, but without the helmet.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

To speed up the process, I propose the judge executes the convict on the spot. Like in Dredd, but without the helmet.

We already have that, or are you suggesting we give cops a promotion in name as well as fact?

 

[Agent327]

The convictions of two mentally disabled half-brothers were vacated and the two men were ordered released by Superior Court Judge Douglas Sasser in North Carolina on Tuesday. They were freed from prison Wednesday. Henry Lee McCollum, 50, had been on death row for 30 years, longer than anyone else in North Carolina history. He and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, were convicted for the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. DNA evidence implicated another man, a known sex offender the police had not investigated, despite the fact that he lived next to the crime scene.

Well, that took a while to correct some police stupidity.