Please help save an innocent man from execution

Noise gets attention, persistent noise gets focused attention, sometimes resulting in actions that bring about justice.

Joe(start here)Nation

AND WE ARE MAKING SOME NOISE NOW!

And you're welcome Joe.

OCCOM BILL wrote:

Thanks for showing up Joe. Really. Do you think there's any chance this man will really be executed? I'd like to think that's extremely unlikely from what's been presented so far. I'd really like to hear your honest opinion... absent your anti-death-penalty beliefs... if possible.

I have no idea. Texas executes inmates whose attorneys fell asleep during their trials, so I suppose anything is possible. I just don't understand why you pro-death penalty folks are getting particularly exercised about this case. As I pointed out above, it's barely distinguishable from dozens of other previous death penalty cases. Where was your outrage then?

As to why THIS case ? I actually stated it earlier, if you bothered to read it...

I look at what this person did and ask if:
A) I thought what they did was wrong
B) Would I have done anything different.

My answer to it in the case of Mr. Maye was a double NO.

And Joe, there may have been dozens of other cases, as you said, but for whatever reason, I didn't hear about them or I just didn't know. That's not an excuse. I should have known. Fedral brought this to our attention and it grabbed me.

In the national debate on capital punishment, much has been made of lawyers who show up in court drunk or sleep through testimony or do such paltry or inept work as to violate their clients' constitutional rights.

But there is another equally daunting issue for indigent inmates with lives on the line: the lack of any lawyer at all. As their cases wend their way through appeals, as state and federal deadlines and hearings come and go and executions near, the Constitution guarantees no right of legal assistance.

The result is a system rooted in crisis. The ABA and other groups estimate that hundreds of inmates are without representation. And with the nation's death-row population nearing a record level and the appeals process still constricted by federal and state laws, soliciting pro bono counsel for them has become increasingly critical and difficult, Maher said.

-snip-

She mentioned, as she often does, her own representation of a young man sitting on death row in the South for a restaurant robbery gone horribly awry. He was 16, reckless and stupid, she said. His murder trial, start to finish, lasted just 1 1/2 days. His attorneys did no investigation; at sentencing, they presented a single witness.

-snip-

Virginia was shamed into legislative action in part by the case of Earl Washington Jr. The mentally retarded farmworker was just a couple of weeks away from execution when a cellmate persuaded a lawyer visiting their prison to intervene. With a New York firm's aid, Washington ultimately was cleared through DNA evidence.

-snip-

"It's a damn serious issue," said U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman of Louisiana, who has urged local lawyers to volunteer on inmates' appeals. "I am a supporter of the death penalty, but I'm a very strong believer in as just and fair and good representation as humanly possible of those who face the ultimate punishment."

-snip-

Schafer never sensed that advantage. He'd gotten involved in Anthony Keith Johnson's appeal to see how the system worked. His client had been the only suspect of four to be tried for a deadly home burglary. Authorities agreed that he was not the killer but sought his death nonetheless. "All I knew, almost from the outset, was that he hadn't had a fair trial, and that was more important to me than whether he was guilty," he recalled.

Johnson asked Schafer not to attend his lethal injection; the lawyer isn't sure he could have handled it anyway: "I just couldn't bear to watch the guy get killed. Maybe out of guilt for having lost the appeal. Maybe like I let him down."

He still chokes at the memory. He still displays the foot-high statue Johnson carved for him from bars of soap mixed with glue. It is an ivory Jesus, arms outstretched.

Experts estimate that about 10 percent of the 3,600 inmates on death row are mentally retarded[*]. In the U.S., 34 people who were known to be mentally retarded have been executed since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Source: Raymond Bonner and Sara Rimer, "Executing the Mentally Retarded Even as Laws Begin to Shift," New York Times, August 7, 2000.

Experts say that a person is mentally retarded who has a significantly subaverage intelligence -- generally defined as an I.Q. below 70 -- and who consequently has serious difficulties coping with routine aspects of daily life, in school and at work.
Also, the condition must have existed since childhood.

Well we cant afford to keep people who are mentally retarded can we?

Well we cant afford to keep people who are mentally retarded can we?