Ray Krone, who spent 10 years in prison for sexual assault and murder,
including time on Arizona's death row, was freed on Monday after a DNA test
exonerated him and cast suspicion on another prisoner.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Mr. Krone was the 100th
innocent man nearly put to death in this country since 1973. Given the way
death-penalty crimes are prosecuted, as the wrongful-conviction scandals in
Illinois a few years back showed, a certain number of mistaken convictions
are essentially built into the process.
A sad reality of the criminal justice system is that in all too many cases,
defendants are convicted of serious crimes on the flimsiest of evidence.
Juries often hang guilty verdicts on the word of a single witness, despite
numerous academic studies showing that witnesses are frequently unreliable.
Courts admit evidence of dubious quality at trial, and send defendants to
prison or to death on the basis of it. The case against Mr. Krone was
largely circumstantial, including expert but apparently inaccurate
testimony that his teeth matched bite marks on the victim.
In the face of this powerful evidence that the system is broken, the courts
should be chastened and they should be working hard to build in
protections against executing the wrongfully convicted. Sadly, however, the
Supreme Court appeared unconcerned about the fairness of the death penalty
in its ruling in a case two weeks ago involving effective assistance of
counsel.
In the case, the court ruled that the conviction of a death row inmate,
Walter Mickens Jr., did not violate the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel
even though the lawyer who was appointed to represent Mr. Mickens had
previously represented the 17-year-old boy he was charged with killing. It
is shocking that the Supreme Court would consider that this arrangement
meets the constitutional standard of effective assistance of counsel. "A
rule that allows the State to foist a murder victim's lawyer onto his
accused [killer] is not only capricious," Justice John Paul Stevens noted
in dissent, "it poisons the integrity of our adversary system of justice."
The Supreme Court has long professed the principle that "death is
different," that in order to deprive someone of his life, the state must be
punctilious about providing him every procedural protection.
Because the court has failed to live up to that standard, it is vital that
bills currently before both houses on Capitol Hill gain the support they
need to become law. The bipartisan Innocence Protection Act would establish
national standards for the representation of capital defendants and provide
resources to meet them. The act would also require the preservation of
biological evidence that may later prove crucial on appeal and ensure death
row inmates access to DNA testing.
This week's discomforting milestone, as calculated by the Death Penalty
Information Center, is further evidence of deep unfairness in the death
penalty system and of the urgent need for a law reducing its inequities.
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