When outgoing President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 people on federal death row, death penalty opponents rejoiced while death penalty supporters cried foul.
In my view as abolitionist, I believe the death penalty is morally wrong. But, even if weren’t, it suffers from several fatal flaws including uneven application, racial bias, and the problem of mental illness.
But perhaps the biggest problem is the lack of guardrails to prevent the execution of innocent people.
Currently, experts and researchers cite the figure of 4 to 10 percent for the probable rate of wrongful convictions. The problem is that is the known rate based on the number of people exonerated from death row since executions resumed in the 1970s.
The problem with that figure is it doesn’t include all the cases where there was credible evidence of innocence where the courts failed to exonerate or order a new trial. The real rate could be much higher—10 to even 20 percent.
That figure doesn’t even include people so mentally compromised as to call into question both their conviction and execution. The case of Andre Thomas is a prime example.
The crime he committed was brutal—he killed his wife and children in an horrific fashion, cutting out their hearts and carrying them in his pocket. But that was a clear a sign of mental illness— while in custody, he proceeded to separately gouge out both of his eyes, the second of which he ate… in order to prevent authorities from tracking him.
This was due to his severe mental illness—and yet, as we spoke with Marc Bookman last year, Texas was still hoping to execute him.
The problem of innocence is far from resolved as three cases in 2024 attest to.
The least well known is the case of Chief Stankewitz. In 2020, a Vanguard Investigation presented evidence of Douglas “Chief” Stankewitz’s innocence.
Stankewitz was convicted in 1978 and was the longest serving person on death row in California before he was removed from death row due to questions about his innocence as well as allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.
But understand that from 1978 until 2017—nearly 40 years later—Chief Stankewitz could have been executed despite strong evidence of his innocence.
In 2023, he was granted a habeas hearing in Fresno. That was held in front of Judge Arlan Harrell in early 2024 and a few weeks ago, Judge Harrell denied the motion.
In a 173-page decision, Judge Arlan Harrell denied the petition for writ of habeas corpus despite the petitioners presenting evidence that the gun in evidence was not the murder weapon.
Judge Farrell ruled, “Petitioner has not proven that the firearm admitted into evidence as the murder weapon is false evidence because Allen Boudreau and Billy Brown testified falsely at the guilt phase of Petitioner’s second trial.”
He concluded, “Petitioner has not met his burden of proof on this false evidence claim. He has not demonstrated that it is more likely than not that any evidence that the Titan .25 caliber firearm admitted at his second trial is the firearm that fired the fatal bullet is false.”
The petitioners in this case presented a tremendous amount of evidence that the gun in evidence was not the murder weapon; they also presented evidence of prosecutorial misconduct, Brady violations, and ineffective assistance of counsel, none of which proved to be enough to get a new trial.
Unfortunately, this is not an isolated incident.
In September, Missouri executed Marcellus Williams for a crime he maintained he did not commit.
In January, the St. Louis County prosecutor’s office filed a 63-page motion to vacate Williams’s 2001 conviction in the killing of a journalist in her home in the St. Louis suburbs.
“Marcellus Williams should be alive today,” said Wesley Bell, then the Prosecuting Attorney of St. Louis County. “If there is even the shadow of a doubt of innocence, the death penalty should never be an option. This outcome did not serve the interests of justice.”
The prosecuting attorney wrote that new DNA evidence, increasing doubts about the credibility of the State’s key witnesses, and constitutional defects including ineffective counsel and racially discriminatory jury selection at trial compelled him to ask the circuit court “to correct this manifest injustice.”
In other words, Missouri executed a man despite DNA evidence that could have exonerated him.
Bell wrote, “A lot of physical evidence was collected at the crime scene—including the murder weapon (a kitchen knife), bloody shoeprints and fingerprints, and hairs on the victim’s t-shirt, her hands, and the floor that did not match her or her husband—and none of it can be tied to Mr. Williams.”
Williams was, in fact, excluded as the source of the footprints and hairs, the fingerprints, and male DNA that was recently recovered from the knife handle.
But the system wouldn’t stop the execution despite this evidence.
In the meantime, in Oklahoma—even with support from the State’s Attorney General and Republican Legislators—it is not clear that they’ll be able to stop the execution of Richard Glossip.
Glossip has been on death row in Oklahoma for 25 years for “masterminding” the 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese, even though it is undisputed that a man named Justin Sneed actually committed the crime.
In 2022, a report was released and Republican Representative Kevin McDugle held a press conference announcing the findings of a third party investigation.
The 343-page report was conducted by the law firm Reed Smith, a 30-member lawyer team assisted by Crowe & Dunlevy of Oklahoma.
“The investigative report confirmed in my mind that we do have an innocent man on death row,” McDugle said. “In my opinion, this entire case against Richard Glossip was manipulated by the detective in charge, and that Richard Glossip has now been behind bars because of the gross misconduct of the DA’s office and the investigation.”
“In Oklahoma, we don’t seek convictions, we seek justice,” he said.
Glossip’s trial was tainted by prosecutorial misconduct, a leading cause of wrongful conviction. To illustrate how bad this one is, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond has conceded errors in Glossip’s case and asked the court to overturn his conviction, and now supports his clemency and opposes his execution.
They still haven’t been to stop the execution—let alone free him.
The Innocence Project writes, “Richard Glossip’s case is a harrowing example of how the justice system can fail an innocent person.”
People will argue we need speedy justice. But look at how long it took people to recognize the injustice in Chief Stankewitz’s case.
It wasn’t until 2014, when Alexandra Cock stepped in—working tirelessly as a paralegal in the case, she reviewed all documents involving the case and is responsible for the collection and organization of evidence used in the Writ of Habeas Corpus.
That’s 36 years after Chief Stankewitz’s conviction. Had it not been for the quirks of California’s death penalty system, he could well have been executed before anyone knew there was a plausible case for innocence.
And if you think this is an exception, remember since 1976 we have exonerated more people from death row than we’ve executed. What should trouble us is how many more Stankewitzes, Glossips, and Williamses are out there, but we just don’t know about them because they don’t have the resources to fight their conviction and no one is taking them seriously.
