NEWS MISSOURI - MO.

[dusty]

MO: Death penalty opponents still seeking clear-cut case
Fri Jul 13, 2007 3:39PM
84.44.235.237


July 13, 2007

Missouri

Death penalty opponents still seeking clear-cut case of innocent's execution

By Heather Ratcliffeand Robert Patrick, St Louis Post-Dispatch

Death penalty opponents still are seeking the ultimate case: the one that
offers clear evidence that an innocent person was executed.

They had hoped that Larry Griffin's conviction and execution for the 1980
drive-by killing of Quintin Moss in St. Louis would qualify. Such a case,
they hoped, would finally turn public and political sentiment against
executions.

But Thursday, St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce released a report
that concludes the right man was executed in the case.

Joyce had reinvestigated the case after a 2005 report by the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund raised questions about Larry Griffin's guilt.

The ultimate case remains elusive.

"They are looking so desperately for that case," said Joshua Marquis, a
board member for the National District Attorneys Association. "I'm not so
arrogant to believe there won't be a day when it will come. It's very
unlikely, but not impossible."

A clear case of the execution of an innocent person in the recent past would

refute U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's declaration last year
that there has not been "a single case - not one - in which it is clear that
a person was executed for a crime he did not commit."

While allowing that the number of wrongful executions may be small,
University of Michigan law school professor Samuel R. Gross, who led the
fund investigation in the Griffin case, thinks wrongful executions already
have been proved.

"I think there are cases where it's clear-cut," he said, citing both
Griffin's case and a case in Bexar County, Texas. But prosecutors and other
death penalty supporters do not want to admit that innocent people have been
executed, he said.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit research
group in Washington, 124 people have been exonerated from death row.

"Many of these exonerations came frighteningly close to their execution
date," said Colleen Cunningham, of Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty.
"Errors clearly abound in death penalty cases."

In fact, a poll this year shows that most Americans - 87 percent - believe
that an innocent person already has been executed. But only 55 percent said
it had affected their opinion about the death penalty, according to the
Death Penalty Information Center.

"Some people still think executing an innocent person is collateral damage,"

said David Elliot, of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Elliot said he thinks the death penalty will be abolished only when the
public decides it's not worth the trouble.

"People are going to have to see it collapse under its biases, blunders and
bureaucracy," he said.

Some say public support for the death penalty already is eroding.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, executions, death
sentences in state courts and the death row population all dropped between
1999 and 2006.

Perceptions about the death penalty may be affected by unfair news coverage
of new investigations into executions, said Marquis, the district attorney
in Clatsop County, Ore., who speaks across the country about the death
penalty. Allegations of innocence get more attention from the media than
reviews that support a conviction, he said.

"In all fairness to reporters, it isn't news when the expected happens,"
Marquis said. "But it's intellectual dishonesty in the death penalty debate
when they just fall off the radar."

Some death penalty opponents suggest that independent commissions should
review cases like Griffin's. They say prosecutors are unlikely or less
likely to xobjectively criticize work by their own offices.

"Here we have the prosecutors reviewing their own work," Gross said. "I
can't imagine anything more self-serving."

But Joyce and other prosecutors say the cases already have been reviewed
multiple times by juries, federal judges, state and federal appeals courts
and the U.S. Supreme Court, and often reviewed again by the prosecutor's
office when concerns are raised.

"The defense attorneys are trained to poke holes in stuff," Joyce said. "Our

perspective is different. We wanted to see a complete picture of
everything."

Prosecutors say that an independent commission would be subject to the same
criticism and would undermine the country's justice system.

--

Circuit Attorney report: Investigative findings, analysis and conclusions

http://images.stltoday.com/stltoday/res ... invest.pdf

(read the entire report on St Louis Post-Dispatch's web page - link below)

---

Source : St Louis Post-Dispatch

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/s ... enDocument