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Friday, March 11, 2005
An Article based on Criminology
January 23, 2005
A Sentence Reluctantly Applied
IN 1647, Alice Young of Windsor was convicted of witchcraft, and became the first recorded person in the state to be executed. There are few mentions of her execution in official records of the time, but if it were like others from the mid-17th century, it took only weeks to carry out.
"The time between conviction and hanging, unless there were extraordinary circumstances, was very swift," said Walter Woodward, Connecticut's state historian and a professor at the University of Connecticut.
In Ludlow's Code, enacted in 1650 as Connecticut's most comprehensive legal code to that date, the state classified all sorts of misdeeds as capital offenses, including idolatry and blasphemy, and New Haven's Code (New Haven was a separate colony then) imposed a death sentence for such crimes as working on Sunday. But, even then, the state was reluctant to tie the noose, Dr. Woodward said.
Connecticut Supreme Court Justice Joette Katz, in a speech on the death penalty to the Connecticut Bar Association in 1994, noted that the sentence was applied sparsely in colonial times, and never for idolatry, blasphemy, kidnapping, or the cursing or smiting of parents by children. She said the state administered its early capital laws mildly.
"They tended to use them more to ward off bad behavior than to actually punish it," Dr. Woodward said.
Now, Connecticut is preparing to execute Michael Ross, the convicted murderer, on Wednesday. It will be the first time the state has exercised the death penalty in 45 years. Alice Young was executed within weeks of her trial. Joseph Taborsky, known as Mad Dog, the last person executed in the state, was put to death in 1960, three years after his conviction. Mr. Ross was sentenced almost 18 years ago, and a handful of the six other death row inmates have been there almost as long. And Mr. Ross would still be waiting if he were not insisting he wanted to die.
Unlike a dozen other states, Connecticut has decided to keep the death penalty on the books, but has shown little inclination to use it. For various reasons, death penalty trials and appeals have lasted longer in Connecticut than elsewhere in the country. The gravity of a death penalty case keeps lawyers and judges from moving hastily and compels public defenders to use every avenue to try to save their clients. But the length of time between executions, experts on the death penalty said, also reveals a deeper ambivalence in Connecticut and other states in the Northeast about imposing the ultimate punishment.
"Over all, ambivalence does slow things down," said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group in Washington, which is critical of the way the penalty is applied. "There are ways this process can go slower if you're more deliberative."
Depending on where people stand on the death penalty debate, Connecticut's history of deliberation is a good or bad thing. For relatives of victims, it can be maddening.
"When it takes 20 and a half years, she did not receive justice," said Raymond Roode, the stepfather of April Brunais, who was one of Mr. Ross's eight murder victims.
"The way the state acts, they act like my daughter's life was a throwaway," he said. "I think he should've been executed 10 years ago." he said.
Mr. Ross himself said he was going forward with the executions to end the pain for the families of victims.
"My execution will not heal the families of my victims, and it will not bring back their daughters," he wrote in a letter to Gov. M. Jodi Rell. "But it will bring about an end to the seemingly never-ending proceedings whether it be future court appearances, or be the future filing of the various post-conviction appeals."
Others were encouraged by the length of deliberations. Susan Omilian, a lawyer from West Hartford who was on the Commission on the Death Penalty, created by the Legislature in 2001 to review the capital punishment laws, acknowledged in an interview that the lags can be difficult for the families of victims. But, she added, they show that the deliberations are taken seriously.
"It should be a long process, because this is a serious decision," she said.
Mr. Roode said he understood and shared the concern many people have about executing innocent people. But Mr. Ross, he said, is certainly guilty.
"There was no question of innocence here," he said. "This guy's guilty. He would've been dead a long time ago in Florida or Texas or other states."
That may be true. The average amount of time nationally between the imposition of a death sentence and execution was 10 years and 7 months as of 2003, according to statistics from the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. In Connecticut, of the seven men on death row, two were first sentenced in 1989, two others in 1991.
Most discussions of the death penalty focus on the period after 1972, when the United States Supreme Court declared that the death penalty as administered was unconstitutional. Many states, including Connecticut, rewrote their death penalty statutes to deal with the ruling. But since 1976, when the court upheld revised capital punishment laws, states in the Northeast have been comparatively slow to put people to death. Only Pennsylvania, which is included in the Northeast in federal statistics, has executed anyone since the ruling and it has executed three people. Texas, by contrast, has executed 337 in that same period.
In states like Texas, arguments and deliberations are often much shorter, said Samuel R. Gross, a death penalty expert at the University of Michigan Law School. Mr. Gross said he had been at entire trials in the South that took just a few days. Texas death row inmates are executed in an average of 10 years 5 months, according to 2003 statistics from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. One Texas inmate, Joe Gonzales, spent just 252 days on death row before being executed.
In Southern states, there are more people on death row, sent there by aggressive prosecutors, willing juries and conservative appeals courts, Mr. Gross said.
In Mr. Ross's case, the delay in moving from the sentence to the execution was caused in part by the decision of the state's Supreme Court to grant him a new hearing on whether he deserved the death penalty. Although Mr. Ross was arrested in 1984 and his initial trial ended in 1987 with the jury sentencing him to death, the Supreme Court reversed the sentence in 1994 because some evidence about the defendant's mental state wasn't introduced. Mr. Ross's conviction stood, but he got a new trial on whether he should be executed.
Before that trial, however, Mr. Ross asked to die to spare the families a second penalty hearing. Arguments about his request went on for two more years before the Supreme Court ruled that his appeal should continue.
The new jury, which heard evidence from psychiatrists about Mr. Ross's sexual sadism, deliberated for nine days in 2000 before agreeing he should die. The Supreme Court affirmed the sentences in May 2004, and again Mr. Ross asked to die. Mr. Ross could still make various appeals to the state and federal government that lawyers said could last at least five more years.
In its report issued in 2003, the Commission on the Death Penalty calculated that it took Connecticut an average of 1 year 264 days to put on trial the defendants who ended up on death row. After conviction, the interval between the notice of appeal and the filing of the defendant's appeal brief took 2 years 284 days. And the interval between the defense's appeal brief and the prosecution's brief was 1 year and 125 days. Once the Supreme Court hears oral arguments, it has taken an average of seven months for it to issue a decision. And further delays can occur if a new hearing must be scheduled, new evidence surfaces, laws change, or the defendant makes a request that must be reviewed.
Lawyers who spoke to the commission said the delays are necessary to make sure the state has put the right person on trial and imposed the right sentence. Defense lawyers pore over transcripts to search for injustice and prosecutors must address each challenge made by the defense. While defense lawyers in a noncapital case might limit appeals to the strongest points, they generally challenge all possible issues in death penalty cases.
"The record of the trial that needs to be reviewed may be 10 or 20 times longer," Mr. Gross said.
In one pending death penalty case in Connecticut, the defendant's appeals brief cited nearly 300 other cases. The prosecution cited more than 350. The appeals brief for the prosecution in Mr. Ross' case was more than 300 pages. The Office of the Chief Public Defender, which has six lawyers working exclusively on capital cases, also employs two mitigation specialists, whose job it is to go over a defendant's background and find reasons why he should not be executed.
In addition, because the state hasn't tested its death penalty statute in so long, many of the issues that often come up in death penalty cases have not been litigated, so the case law is still thin.
When Mr. Ross asked to be executed after his first appeal, for instance, courts spent years considering his request.
"That involved quite a bit of time to decide how to do it," said T. R. Paulding, a lawyer Mr. Ross hired to expedite the process of putting him to death.
The commission, however, found that the process was also slowed by an attitude among the people involved.
"The commission's review found that the principal players in death penalty appeals (defense counsel, the State, or the Courts) do not generally focus upon expediting the death penalty appeals process," the commission wrote.
Mr. Dieter said a death penalty case can be delayed in a state like Connecticut "if any actor along the way questions it."
"In places like Connecticut, sometimes it's the state court, sometimes it's the federal court, sometimes it's the governor," he said. "Just in being ambivalent, they might say, 'I'm just going to have that expert testify or have that DNA tested.' Things do have a way of slowing down when you look at things closely.
"You almost need all the elements to work well to move executions forward," he said.
In interviews, commission members praised the work of the public defender's office, saying it ensured that defendants receiver adequate representation. The commission concluded that the state should not expedite the trials if it risked harming the rights of the defendants, though it did urge the state to increase the budgets for the offices involved to speed the process. Officials at the public defender's and state's attorney's offices said their budgets had not increased markedly in response to the recommendation.
Garrett Flynn, a Farmington lawyer who was on the commission, also said he thought some of the court battles over the death penalty were really deliberations about whether the state should even have the death penalty. Even when there was no question of innocence, people continue to fight, he said.
"I think people still fight the imposition of the death penalty because they're against the death penalty, not based exclusively on the facts of the cases," he said. "In some ways, defense attorneys are fighting the death penalty itself as much as the case in front of them. That can lead to delays."
Patrick J. Culligan, the chief of trial services for the Office of the Chief Public Defender, said the public defender's office was focused specifically on Mr. Ross's case.
"Our belief is that he is not competent to make the decision to forgo further legal proceedings available to him to fight for a life sentence," he said.
Mr. Ross has argued repeatedly that he was competent and that he was sure that now is the time for him to die.
But before the lethal fluids are injected, state law still gives him the chance to call it off because he still has appeals available. Some of those awaiting his death doubt he will stick to his pledge to die.
"He's a real coward," Mr. Roode said. "I don't see him allowing himself to be executed for us. I think he's going to blink."
* credits to NYtimes.
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this article is COOL!
memories jotted down @ 10:23 AM `