July 17, 2007	Tuesday	Rajab 01, 1428

WASHINGTON: Although dozens of US death row inmates have been proven innocent, death penalty opponents are seeking to bolster their cause by proving that at least one of the 1,087 people executed over the last 30 years in the United States was innocent.

Thanks primarily to new DNA evidence, a total of 124 people sentenced to die have been recently proven innocent of the crime they were convicted for, many after spending years on death row.

Their fates have served as the strongest arguments for advocates of abolishing the death penalty in the United States, 30 years after it was revived following a 10 year moratorium.

But death penalty opponents have been challenged by powerful defenders of executions to find a single case where an innocent man was actually put to death.

Last year Antonin Scalia, one of the most conservative justices on the US Supreme Court, said that the reversal of an erroneous convictions “demonstrates not the failure of the system but its success”. Scalia said that like other human institutions, courts and juries were not perfect, and one could not have a system of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be punished mistakenly.

But with regard to the death penalty in the United States, he continued, that possibility has been reduced to an insignificant minimum.

“This explains why those ideologically driven to ferret out and proclaim a mistaken modern execution have not a single verifiable case to point to, whereas it is easy as pie to identify plainly guilty murderers who have been set free,” the justice said.

Scalia cited the case of Roger Coleman, whose case for innocence of charges of rape and murder earned support from Time magazine before his execution in 1992. In early 2006 Coleman’s guilt was confirmed by DNA analysis.

If an innocent person had been executed, argued Scalia, “we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby”. The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP) responded in June with a report detailing the cases of four executed inmates, whose cases cast serious doubt on their guilty verdicts.

They include Ruben Cantu, a 26-year-old Latino man from San Antonio, Texas, who was executed in August 1993 for a murder committed in 1985, when he was 17.

In November 2005, The Houston Chronicle published an investigative series in which it reported that another defendant in the murder who pleaded guilty, but who did not testify at Cantu’s trial, had signed an affidavit swearing that Cantu had no role in the murder.

Another executed man whose conviction was questionable, according to the NCADP, was Larry Griffin, a 40-year-old black man from St. Louis, Missouri who was put to death in June 1995 for the drive-by shooting of a drug dealer in 1980.

The only evidence against him was a witness, Robert Fitzgerald, a white career criminal with several pending felony charges, who claimed to have seen Griffin at the crime scene.

But in July 2005, the St. Louis Post Dispatch reported that the first police officer on the scene and the victim’s sister both agreed that Fitzgerald himself wasn’t in the neighbourhood when the shooting occurred.

David Elliot, a spokesman for NCADP, said Texas and Missouri need to set up independent commissions to investigate these cases.

“Innocent people get sent to death row because humans run the criminal justice system and humans make mistakes,” Elliot said.

“The government cannot investigate itself and expect to reach a fair conclusion” on whether the executed men were wrongly convicted, he said. “It’s the fox guarding the hen house.” Meanwhile, NCADP, Amnesty International and other organisations have mobilised to try to save the life of Troy Davis, a black man who is scheduled to be executed in Georgia on Tuesday for the murder of a white police officer.

The majority of witnesses in the case have retracted their testimony, making it possible that Davis becomes the 125th person freed from death row.—AFP