Re: Is justice delayed 24 years justice?

> > - It is the choice of the person about to be executed to delay the
> > process.
>
> Really? I've seen cases reported here in the past of inmates who are resigned to their fate, but whose relatives
> or "supporters" choose to continue the legal battle.
>

Unless you can get a court to declare that an inmate is incapable of
participating in his own defense, then he gets to run the show.  Sometimes
a relative will try to get the court to declare that the guy's insane or
something so they can file an appeal on his behalf.  I don't believe that
works very often.

>
> > Essentially, they are allowed a large number of appeals in order
> > to give them every possible chance to prove their innocence, prove that
> > there was a judicial mistake made, that rules were not followed, etc.  In
> > this case every single avenue possible was pursued, every single delaying
> > tactic available to the defense was used, and that is why it took 24
> > years.  Had the defense wanted to get it over with, it would not have
> > taken nearly as long
>
> How long does it take for these appeals once filed to be heard? Is there any reason why they cannot be heard
> concurrently? And if there are so many grounds for appeal that it takes 24 years to hear them all, do not the
> very multitudes of these bases for appeal when added together form a "reasonable doubt"? I'm thinking that if
> the prosecution cannot produce a sufficiently cast iron case for it to be wrapped up within, say, five years,
> perhaps the death penalty should automatically be commuted.
>

No, it's more that there are a number of appeals for each appeal, etc.
The US legal system simply is that slow, I'm afraid.  I can't seem to find
these statistics for the USA, but a quick google search finds  that for
Canada, in 2004 it took 3.7 months from the filing to the decision to
grant leave to appeal, another 9.4 months until the hearing, and another
4.0 months until the judgment.  This was actually down from 5.4, 12.5, and
5.8 in 2000.  In the US, there are a number of steps for each appeal.

In addition, once the normal appeals are lost, you can appeal for all
sorts of things.  For example, you find somebody who's a new witness that
didn't appear at the trial.  Go to the trial judge, who tells you that
he's irrelevant.  But he'll take you that 15 months to tell you he's
irrelevant.  Then appeal his decision to a higher court - 15 months, then
15 months again, then maybe 15 months yet one more time.  And if a court
declines to hear the case, that usually takes a few months for them to
decline it, too.  And that's even for something frivolous.

Then again, the best I can do searching in England suggests that the
average waiting time for a conviction appeal is 14.7 months (although many
fewer applications for appeal are granted).

Further, you see, it's more than 15 months because you don't actually have
to appeal immediately.  In fact, you wait for the judge to set an
execution date.  Once that's done, you appeal and that delays the
execution date.  So a defense attorney determined to run out the clock can
continue to try and do so.

It can also take 10 years for corporations to exhaust their appeals when
they lose civil suits - that's one of many factors driving these suits
towards settlements.

What I'm saying is that the problem is more that the US justice system is
generally slow than that it is slow in this particular case.  This is
slower, simply because in a death penalty case it is mandatory that a
certain number of appeals be granted.

But I think the difference is that in the British system, as I understand
it from googling it seems that appeals are normally not granted, and are
only granted in cases where there might be merit.  In the United States,
we tend to grant appeals on much less dubious grounds, but most appeals
fail (the statistics I found for Scotland were that something a little
over half of all appeals were in some manner successful).  And in a death
penalty case, the first few appeals are granted automatically, even if
there are no grounds whatsoever.

Some examples, ripped from whatever sources I could find using google:

In 1978, Robert Alton Harris, a 26-year-old paroled murderer, kidnapped
two California teenagers in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. He
drove to a remote canyon where he killed the two boys, then finished the
hamburgers they'd been eating and drove off. Harris was later caught
robbing a bank. He confessed to the murders and was sentenced to death in
1979. Yet he managed to delay his execution for 13 years by repeatedly
manipulating the appeals system. Harris and his lawyers challenged the
quality of his psychiatric evaluation, claimed California's gas chamber
was unconstitutional, and argued that the death penalty discriminated
against younger killers, males, and those who killed whites. Each of these
claims stalled his execution. In a flurry of last-minute appeals, the
Supreme Court overturned four separate stays on the night of Harris'
execution before it took the unprecedented step of forbidding lower courts
to issue further stays. By the time he was finally put to death in 1992,
Harris had managed to get more than 20 appeals.

Another example: you can claim that the prisoner has gone insane on death
row.  This claim has no time limit, and can be tried multiple times,
because, after all, maybe it's happened since the last spurious claim.
And of course if he has, then he can't be executed until he's treated and
becomes sane again.

The problem is, you can't really stop these.  Some states, for example,
have tried to stop these appeals by adding the rule that after some time
period, you cannot bring in new evidence.  However, there was case (was it
in Virginia, maybe?) where DNA evidence proved the innocence of a death
row inmate.  However, that DNA evidence was more than whatever period
after their trial, so it was not allowed to be used in order to stop the
execution.  Finally, I think the governor had to step in and pardon the
guy because the courts weren't able to deal with it.

So I'm afraid that the answer is that our justice system is screwed up in
some ways, and that the best solution ends up being to allow these lengthy
appeals.  However, it should be pointed out that the length of the appeal
does not have a strong correlation with the likelihood of guilt.  It has a
stronger correlation with the willingness of the inmate to fight and the
ability of their lawyers to delay things.

	-Charles


------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> 
Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! Groups. Make Yahoo! your home page
http://us.click.yahoo.com/dpRU5A/wUILAA/yQLSAA/7tRolB/TM
--------------------------------------------------------------------~->