WASHINGTON, DC – The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) released research studies about the length of time before exoneration for those facing the death penalty, and has found “in the past 20 years, the average length of time before exoneration has roughly tripled …at 38.7 years.”
The DPIC, in short, said its “analysis confirms the sobering fact that innocent death sentenced people are inadequately protected in our legal system.”
During the DPIC’s research, it found “procedural rules restricting prisoner appeals and resistance by state officials to credible claims of innocence” may increase time.
The DPIC used its “Innocence Database,” which “tracks people who were exonerated since 1973, after the Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia invalidated the nation’s death penalty statutes and commuted the sentences of everyone on death row.”
Using their “Innocence Database,” the DPIC found that “a person exonerated in 1973 would have spent a maximum of 10 years on death row, while a person exonerated today would have spent over 50 years.”
The DPIC found that today “people continue to be exonerated who were sentenced to death at the very beginning of the modern death penalty era.”
Despite the introduction of DNA testing, the DPIC found “the availability of DNA evidence does not appear to significantly affect the trend. Only one-sixth of death row exonerations involved DNA.”
The DPIC believes the 1996 “Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act” (AEDPA) is the beginning of these “efforts to restrict the number and scope of appeals.”
This, according to the DPIC, is because “death-sentenced prisoners are guaranteed direct appeals …but these appeals are limited to the facts and evidence that were introduced at trial.
“Only after this direct review … can prisoners present new evidence and claims such as ineffective assistance of trial counsel, suppression of evidence by prosecutors, or new DNA results establishing innocence.”
Yet, this has more limitations, said DPIC, including “a strict one-year deadline for federal post-conviction appeals, and narrowed grounds upon which federal courts could grant post-conviction relief.”
Additionally, DPIC said the “AEDPA also bars death-sentenced prisoners from bringing more than one federal post-conviction appeal (and) in recent years, Supreme Court decisions interpreting the provisions of AEDPA have further narrowed the legal avenues available to prisoners.”
The DPIC noted that “there is no federal constitutional right to counsel in state post-conviction proceedings, forcing prisoners to rely on pro bono lawyers or whatever counsel the state may choose to provide (or not) – and they generally have no legal remedy for the ineffective performance of counsel during these state proceedings.”
The DPIC’s research also noted the “state statute of limitations and the one-year deadline imposed by AEDPA, along with chronic underfunding of defense counsel, mean that claims that must be made at this stage are too often missed.”
The DPIC “found that 71 percent of all exonerations involved official misconduct, but the number was 95 percent (18 of 19) for exonerations that took 30 years or longer. Over half of all exonerations of exonerations involved both official misconduct and perjury/false accusations.”
DPIC explained “the most common method of exoneration … is a formal dismissal of charges… (and) even in the face of compelling evidence of innocence, many death-sentenced prisoners have been forced to plead guilty to lesser charges and forego compensation in order to avoid the prosecutor’s threat of another trial and possible death sentence.”
The DPIC references law professors Jon B. Gould and Richard A. Leo … who characterize the U.S. criminal legal system as “‘highly prone to error because of structural truth-seeking flaws,’” noting concerns about the “the ensuing uproar if convicted defendants are released when the evidence is ‘merely’ suggestive of innocence.”
