Friday, February 20, 2009
Law and Order Study Shows Flaws in Tennessee's Death Penalty System
Posted by PJ Tobia on Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 11:00 AM
The death penalty process in Tennessee is very broken. Defense attorneys don't always get access to prosecution evidence, cases drag on for years, and the state doesn't have any idea of the total cost of putting someone to death. So says a legislative study committee which just spent 16 months analyzing the death penalty process--from trial to execution--in Tennessee. But there is major flaw in the death penalty system that the committee did not address: Prosecutorial discretion.
In Tennessee, there are no guidelines for what qualifies as a capital case. This Scene cover story from last year by Sarah Kelley, showed that the cases selected for the death penalty are often chosen at random.
Some prosecutors declined to pursue the death penalty for really heinous crimes with a clear killer, while other prosecutors got capital convictions in cases with sketchy evidence and murky circumstances. The decision of whether to pursue the ultimate punishments is left entirely up to the prosecutors.
From Kelley's superb article:
In Tennessee, capital justice is a grim game of chance, where the outcome often hinges on the whims of a particular prosecutor, and where judges rarely find a death sentence excessive. While it's easy to make moral arguments against the death penalty...perhaps the worst criticism about capital punishment in Tennessee is that it's arbitrary and irrational. In fact, one of the state's highest prosecutors cavalierly admits that the decision to pursue the death penalty is based on a "gut feeling." Judge Gilbert Merritt of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals once noted that prosecution policies vary radically in each jurisdiction, adding that a murderer who receives a death sentence in Shelby County likely would not even be subject to a capital trial in Davidson County or most places in East Tennessee. "The administration of the death penalty nationwide remains broken and arbitrary, and that seems particularly true in Tennessee," Merritt said in 2005. "We must stop the randomized selection of defendants by the state for execution.This is just not good enough for the American criminal justice system. No matter how you feel about the death penalty, the random application of the ultimate punishment is unacceptable. And we should not be relying on prosecutors using their "gut" to decide whether a case is capital or not. If Tennessee is going to have a death penalty, we need to handle it like grownups, with hard and fast rules about what crimes get it and what crimes don't.
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