Shapiro and the Moratorium

Shapiro and the Moratorium

https://www.post-gazette.com/news/state/2023/02/05/shapiro-must-decide-whether-and-how-to-keep-wolf-s-death-penalty-moratorium-in-place/stories/202302050045

With all the concerns raised by the task force, it’s very unlikely that Mr. Shapiro will allow executions to resume, said Kathleen Lucas, executive director of Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

“We're still the only state in the country that doesn't fund attorneys for people that can't afford to hire one. We've got police and prosecutors who've engaged in serious misconduct. There's one case where the DA's office told the defendant that if he didn't plead guilty, they would seek the death penalty against him. Guess what? He wasn't even eligible for the death penalty,” she said.

“You just can't carry out an execution when you've already been warned that the system is broken. There's no way Gov. Shapiro is going to end the moratorium,” she said.

Fair Defense Funding is a MUST

Fair Defense Funding is a MUST

https://triblive.com/opinion/rob-perkins-fair-defense-funding-is-a-must-for-criminal-justice-reform/

“Our local system for providing counsel to poor people facing criminal charges violates people’s constitutional rights. The most pressing problem is chronic underfunding. Attorney compensation in particular hasn’t increased in 17 years.

Predictably, unfair pay leads to underperformance. This should matter to all of us. When defense attorneys fail to do their job effectively, the criminal legal system malfunctions — and good people’s lives are ruined. Allegheny County President Judge Kim Berkeley Clark must act to improve this system.”

- Rob Perkins for Trib Live

Familiarity Breeds Contempt

“Across this country, proponents of capital punishment are playing defense. They are doing so because the death penalty has been tarnished by mounting concerns about executing the innocent, by pervasive racial bias throughout the system, and by the prevalence of botched executions.

The governing maxim for today’s death penalty is: familiarity breeds contempt. The more that people know about it, the less they support capital punishment.”

Austin Sarat

https://verdict.justia.com/2022/11/21/with-americas-death-penalty-new-evidence-shows-that-familiarity-breeds-contempt

Extend the Moratorium, then Kill the DP

Opinion: "Pennsylvania’s dormant death penalty statute has hung around for more than a decade, costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving a moral stain on the state." -Jeffrey Gerritt

https://post-gazette.com/opinion/jeffery-gerritt/2022/11/13/josh-shapiro-tom-wolf-capital-punishment/stories/202211130050 via

@PittsburghPG

Another PA Exoneree.. 87 After We Killed Him

Another PA Exoneree.. 87 After We Killed Him

https://www.inquirer.com/news/alexander-mcclay-williams-murder-conviction-overturned-delaware-county-20220615.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mnl_6_16_2022&clickText=trying-to-prove-his-innocence&clickHeader=opening-note&sfmc_id=0031U000024AbWwQAK&sub_source=daily_morning_newsletter&list_name=DE08_Daily_Morning_Newsletter&int_promo=newsletter&et_rid=591158412

Interview: End the Death Penalty with Jason Flom

https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/jason-flom-music-industry-execution-b1955463.html 

Nov. 15 2021

Why the record exec behind Lorde and Katy Perry is fighting against the death penalty

Musicians and entertainers have campaigned for those on death row with renewed urgency in recent years. Clémence Michallon speaks to Jason Flom, one of the industry figures seeking to end capital punishment 

Music industry executive Jason Flom has made it his mission to campaign against the death penalty. 

(Sarah Cramer Shields / Courtesy of LAVA Records)

Leer en Español

Jason Flom has one question for supporters of the death penalty: “What percentage of innocent people are you OK with executing?”

The music executive, who has shaped the careers of artists such as Katy Perry, Lorde, and Greta Van Fleet, isn’t being glib.

“There’s always going to be a percentage,” he tells The Independent from his home in Los Angeles. “[People say,] ‘No, we have to be really sure.’ What does that mean? Even if you removed all the perverse incentives that cause wrongful convictions, you’d still have a system in which there’s human error. So there’s always going to be a percentage.”

Flom is one of more than 150 business leaders who have joined the anti-death penalty campaign launched by Sir Richard Branson and the Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ), a non-profit organisation that works with the private sector to champion fairness in the criminal justice system. 

Other industry signatories to the pledge include Merck Mercuriadis, founder of the Hipgnosis Songs Fund. 

“Business leaders are major contributors to the global economy and we need to step up and use our voices to create systemic change,” Mr Mercuriadis said earlier this year. “The death penalty needs to end, and we need to be part of making that happen.”

Music industry activism around the death penalty isn’t new. Capital punishment disproportionately affects Black people in the US, and entertainers of colour have long led the way on execution activism. 

Duke Ellington 

The legendary jazz musician Duke Ellington, for example, worked with the NAACP and performed at benefit concerts for the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black teens who were falsely convicted of rape in 1931 and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. Their case is considered one of the most famous miscarriages of justice in US history. Artists such as Billie Holiday and Nina Simone used their work during the civil rights movement to call attention to lynchings, a practice that shares historical roots with the death penalty.

In recent years, the industry has seen a new wave of activism and intersectional art coinciding with the Black Lives Matter Movement. Rapper Kendrick Lamar delivered a memorable performance at the 2016 Grammy awards recreating a prison chain gang. Beyoncé showed herself appearing to drown on a New Orleans police car in the video for her hit “Formation” – the same year she released the album and film Lemonade, expanding on the themes of racism and police brutality. Kim Kardashian West has used her considerable platform to advocate for justice issues, lobbying Donald Trump to grant clemency to a number of lifetime and death row inmates. She has called for a stop to the impending execution of death row inmate Julius Jones, a man on Oklahoma death row whom she visited in 2020. Jones has been behind bars for decades for a murder he says he didn’t commit, with a growing body of evidence to back up his claims.

Flom’s own criminal justice reform efforts date back to the 1990s. He was a founding board member of the Innocence Project, a non-profit created in 1992 to exonerate the wrongfully convicted. In 2016, he launched the Wrongful Conviction podcast, on which he has interviewed exonerees as well as imprisoned people who maintain they did not commit the crimes they have been convicted for. (Recent interviewees have included Ron Jacobsen, a man who spent 30 years in prison before DNA testing proved his innocence; Carlon Roman, who was exonerated this summer of a wrongful 1990 murder conviction; and Joe D’Ambrosio, sentenced to death in 1989 and exonerated after 22 years.) Flom also hosts the Righteous Conviction podcast, currently in its second season, featuring interviews with advocates who have also fought to reform the American criminal justice system.

Flom’s decision to join the fight to end the death penalty in the US was motivated in part by his belief that death isn’t a mode of punishment fit for an unceasingly imperfect system. Beyond that is the existential belief that killing people isn’t a punishment a country should be able to enact on its citizens, even if a mistake were somehow rendered impossible.

“Every other Western country came to this conclusion generations ago,” he says. “The one thing that sticks in my head is why do we kill people to show that killing people is wrong?”

At this, Flom walks to his bathroom to show me a book he’s been reading: defence lawyer Marc Bookman’s A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. In it, Bookman writes about cases involving “drunken lawyering, prosecutorial misconduct, racist judges and jurors”, and mental illness.

“That book examines cases of people who are not innocent,” Flom says. “What you learn in it is some of these people may have been technically guilty, but you start to learn about some of the circumstances and you go, ‘Oh, that’s not okay.’”

Flom had a major “that’s not okay” moment of his own in 1993, when he read a story “in the New York Post, of all places”, about a man named Steven Lennon who had been handed a prison sentence of 15 years to life for a first-time, nonviolent cocaine possession charge in New York State.

“I saw this article and my head exploded,” Flom says. “Everything I thought I knew about justice and equity and fairness and the blindfolded lady with the scales of justice – that was all out the window” Flom saw similarities between his life and Lennon’s.

“I had been a drug addict myself as a kid,” he says. “I was the same age as he was when I read the article. He had been in prison for eight years. I had been sober for about eight years. I’m not a religious person, but there but for the grace of God go I.”

The moment turned into a call for action for Flom: “I didn’t know that there was nothing that could be done, so I decided to do something.” Flom called a criminal defence attorney he knew from his career in the music industry and asked whether anything could be done for Lennon. 

“He said, ‘No, but I’ll help you anyway. And we ended up in a courtroom six months later. [The lawyer] found some legal loophole. I sat there, and the judge banged the gavel down and sent [Lennon] home. And I That was the greatest feeling I’ve ever had. I was like, ‘Holy s***, I have a superpower. Now I’ve got to use it.”

Flom’s career as a music executive has fuelled his perseverance as an advocate.

“In both cases, we work on long shots,” he says, pointing out that 60,000 new songs get added to Spotify every day. “A large percentage of them never get listened to even once. The idea that somebody can actually break through requires magic and hard work and talent and everything else. And there are 2.12 million people in prison in America, and 4.5 million on probation and parole. The idea that we can help to extricate someone [from the system] is also a long shot. It shouldn’t be, but it is.”

Oklahoma is content to proceed with torturous executions

Oklahoma is content to proceed with torturous executions

“The reason it’s so offensive is that being executed by the state is the ultimate involuntary act,” Marc Bookman, a co-founder and the executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, told me. “What could be less voluntary? They give you the whole Camus business about when you’re going to be executed and whatnot. And then the state tasks you with coming up with a means of execution that’s constitutional. And what that does is it converts an involuntary act into a collaboration between you and the people who’re trying to kill you.”

"Too often, the law decides that a child is not a child."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/my-cousin-killed-a-child-at-age-16-does-he-deserve-to-die-in-prison/2021/10/29/87d5bd26-3811-11ec-8be3-e14aaacfa8ac_story.html

REVIEW: David R. Dow's take on A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays

If you are against capital punishment and you want to persuade a death penalty supporter to your point of view, do not talk about morality. That is the wrong strategy for two separate reasons. The first is that most death penalty supporters also hold their view for moral reasons; they believe in the concept of an eye for an eye, even if they do not quite understand that the rabbis living at the time of Jesus had long since made carrying out executions practically impossible.

But there is a second reason as well: High-brow philosophical discussions of capital punishment, of the kind one might find in the writings of Immanuel Kant or John Stuart Mill, have exactly nothing to do with the system of capital punishment as it actually exists in the United States.

Someone who wants to convince a death penalty supporter to change her mind is best off, therefore, focusing on the world in which we actually live. And in that world, there are two facts about the death penalty that play prominently in the debate over whether to keep it: the first is cost, the second is stories.

Marc Bookman is a long-time death penalty lawyer in Pennsylvania and the executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation. In his new book, A Descending Spiral, there is not a spreadsheet to be found. Bookman is not interested in the economics of capital punishment; he is interested in the stories. And he tells these stories in a riveting and page-turning way that will leave most readers embarrassed or in disbelief, or maybe both, that such a system can still exist in 21st century America.

Sister Helen Prejean, the world’s most well-known death penalty opponent, famously said that popular support for capital punishment is a mile wide but only an inch deep. Support for the death penalty has shallow roots because most people do not know very much, if they know anything at all, about how the system actually works. Bookman aims to change that and provide a crash course for all those Americans whose opinion favoring the death penalty rests on a hollow foundation.

Most of the 12 chapters focus on a single case that illuminates a single significant yet recurring failure of the death penalty system. There is the defendant in Florida who gets sentenced to death by the judge even though the jurors want his life to be spared. We meet a defendant in Texas so mentally ill he gouges out his own eyeballs, and a Jewish defendant who is sentenced to death by a racist and anti-Semitic judge in a Texas county who distributed a book to prosecutors telling them to make sure the jury did not contain “Jews, Negroes, Dagos, [or] Mexicans.”

In Georgia, a death-sentenced inmate was represented at trial by a lawyer who drank more vodka every day than most people drink water. We meet a man facing death in Pennsylvania who confessed to a crime he did not commit and another whose crime was to kill his sexual abuser. Bookman writes about sordid police and about jurors who casually use racist language during their deliberations to describe the men whose fates they control. 

Perceptive readers will have two questions: How common are these debacles? And why don’t they get corrected during the appellate process? Bookman answers them both, clearly and dispassionately.

As for the debacles, they are routine. Not every death penalty lawyer can tell war stories with Bookman’s elegance or verve, but Bookman explains they could all tell them in some form or fashion. Bookman has mined the universe of capital cases not for the extraordinary, but for the mundane, and he has gathered these quotidian details into a volume that reveals abstract and philosophical discussions about the morality of capital punishment to be a farce. The death penalty is not a debate topic for intellectuals sitting in a sidewalk cafe; it is a remnant of lynching, an arbitrary system where racists and demagogues rig the results to disfavor the poor and the powerless and those with black or brown skin.

As for the supposed safety net of the appeals system, Bookman shows how through a combination of hostile legislation and judges who are unprincipled or indifferent, these cases fall through the cracks because the cracks have become chasms. Our system might not be as corrupt or broken as the system in Iran — nobody can know for sure because the Iranian system is a secretive black box — but it is more corrupt and broken than the typical death penalty supporter could even begin to imagine. 

It is hard to predict whether Bookman’s book will change any minds. But it is easy to conclude that if it doesn’t at least shatter the faith of any death penalty supporter who reads it, that supporter’s mind was not open to begin with.

David R. Dow is the Cullen Professor at the University of Houston Law Center and a founder of the Texas Innocence Network and the Juvenile and Children’s Advocacy Project as well as an avid writer and active abolitionist.

Subscribe to E-News