EDGES MAGAZINE Issue 26

July/Aug 2001

Edges around the world
SENTENCED TO DEATH IN AMERICA

Edges Listens to account from Amensty International

''You'll never hear another sound like a mother wailing whenever she's watching her son being executed. There's no other sound like it. It is just this horrendous wail. You can't get away from it. That wail surrounds the room. It's definitely something you won't ever forget.''

Media witness to 52 executions

In most US capital trials, including at federal level, it is the jury which has the last word on whether the defendant should be sentenced to death or not. It is disturbing, therefore, when evidence emerges that a death sentence may have been the result of confusion or coercion in the juryroom. This is one of the legal concerns relating to the case of Louis Jones, the first prisoner sentenced to death under the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act.

Louis Jones, who is African American, was convicted of the kidnapping, rape and murder of a 19-year-old white woman named Tracie McBride. Tracie McBride was abducted from the Goodfellow Air Force Base, San Angelo, Texas, on 18 February 1995. She was a US Army soldier assigned to the base for training. After the jury convicted Louis Jones of the crime, they were presented with substantial mitigating evidence to weigh against the government's contention that the aggravating factors relating to the crime and the defendant should result in a death sentence. The defence evidence included details of Jones' childhood of physical and sexual abuse; his achievements during his 22-year career in the army; possible post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his experiences on active service; and evidence of various mental impairments at the time of the crime.(100)

Louis Jones was facing one of two sentences: a death sentence or life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Because of the kidnapping charge, under federal law he would never be released if the jury voted for imprisonment. However, the judge instructed the jury that it could recommend death, life without the possibility of release, or a lesser sentence. If they chose the latter, he, the judge, would decide its length. The jury evidently did not reach its verdict easily. It took a day and a half to decide, during which time it rejected three of the aggravating factors alleged by the government, including that Jones posed a future danger to society and that his crime had involved substantial planning or premeditation. Nevertheless, it returned a unanimous vote for death.

After the trial, two jurors provided affidavits that there had been confusion and coercion in the jury room. They said that the judge's instruction had led some jurors to believe that if they could not reach a unanimous verdict either on death or life without the possibility of release, that the judge would impose a lesser sentence. The whole jury was agreed that they did not want this to happen. After a while, the vote stood at 10 for death with two women (the signatories to the affidavits) holding out for imprisonment. The majority pressed the two women to change their vote. One of them, the lone African American on the jury, was singled out after she began crying and saying that she could not impose a death sentence. The majority, the other woman's affidavit claimed, began ''getting on her'' and ''pushing her hard'' until the black woman finally changed her vote. At that point the second woman changed her vote too. In her affidavit, the African American juror stated: ''I do not feel that the death sentence is the appropriate sentence in this case and I changed my vote because of the intense pressure from other jurors and the information that Mr Jones would get a sentence that would result in his release from prison if we had a hung jury.''

In 1999, a sharply divided US Supreme Court upheld the death sentence. Four of the nine Justices dissented, believing that the jury had been misinformed by the judge's instruction, and that there was, at least, a reasonable likelihood that this had tainted the jury deliberations. Furthermore, the dissenting Justices agreed with the defence contention that: ''Capital sentencing should not be a game of 'chicken', in which life or death turns on the happenstance of whether the particular 'life' jurors or 'death' jurors in each case will be the first to give in...''.

The crimes for which those on death row were convicted shock the human conscience. These murders have caused immeasurable suffering, particularly to the family and friends of the victims. Their suffering deserves society's compassion and respect, and a constructive response from government. This response should not be at the expense of the human rights of the accused, however, and access to justice and redress should not slip into officially-sanctioned vengeance. As the UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions said in his report on the USA in 1998, ''courts should not become a forum for retaliation. The duty of the State to provide justice should not be privatised and brought back to victims, as it was before the emergence of modern States.''

Elected officials in the USA often speak of the ''closure'' that an execution will bring to the family of a murder victim, despite the absence of evidence that it can guarantee any such outcome, and ignoring evidence from those murder victims' relatives who say an execution only makes matters worse. They argue that an execution is an appalling memorial for they're lost family member, that it perpetuates a culture of violence, and creates more victims. Just like murder victims, death row inmates have loved ones, too. The family members of a condemned prisoner become victim to the government's calculated bid to exterminate their relative, which can lead to their stigmatisation, social isolation, grief, and depression.

Perhaps the most infamous crime resulting in a federal death sentence was the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, in which 168 people died. This crime hastened the enactment of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, in which the federal government sought to limit federal judicial review of state court decisions and speed up executions. In other words, in the name of the victims of the Oklahoma bombing, the government responded with legislation, which increased the risk of the execution of wrongfully convicted or wrongly sentenced defendants. It exacerbated the failings of an already deeply flawed system.

Bud Welch lost his only child, Julie, in the Oklahoma atrocity. She had been working as a Spanish translator for the Social Security Administration when she was killed in the bombing. At first, Welch recalls, all he wanted was for those responsible to be killed for the crime. ''I didn't want a trial for them. To me juries, judges, lawyers were simply a waste of time. I wanted them fried... I think I would have taken their lives myself if I'd had the opportunity to do so.'' As the months passed, he slowly changed his mind. After the conviction of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, Bud Welch visited the scene of the bombing: ''I realised that to execute either one of them would be an act of rage and revenge... That is what the death penalty is.'' He now actively campaigns against the death penalty across the USA.

It is difficult to draw any conclusion other than that these efforts to ensure uniform application of the law have failed completely. As Justice Blackmun said in 1994, ''it surely is beyond dispute that if the death penalty cannot be administered consistently and rationally, it may not be administered at all.'' It is time for the US Government to recognise this fact and, in Justice Blackmun's words, to stop tinkering with the machinery of death.

Courtesy of Amnesty International.

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. Material Copyright © 2001 THOMAS (Those on the Margins of a Society)
THOMAS is an integral part of Catholic Welfare Societies, Registered Charity number 503102