Some Georgia death row inmates may soon be without representation for their appeals, potentially delaying the entire death penalty process. The Georgia Bar Foundation has traditionally provided funds to the Georgia Appellate Practice and Educational Resource Center, a twelve-person non-profit organization that represents or assists most of the 90 inmates on Georgia’s death row. Because of the economic downturn, the Foundation’s collections have declined in recent years and their grant to the Resource Center dropped to zero this year. The state legislature has also been providing funds to the Center annually, but the recent budget crisis has forced it to cut funding by more than $200,000. Rob Remar, chairman of the Resource Center’s board, said, “If the Resource Center loses more employees, it will have to take fewer cases, and there will be some inmates who are unrepresented. The likely outcome is that the system will grind to a halt for those people who don’t have lawyers.” State Rep. Jay Powell, a Republican from Camilla, who heads a key House budget subcommittee, agreed: “My feeling is we can be penny wise or pound foolish, because if we don’t pay enough on the front end, we’ll pay more in the back end. If appeals aren’t properly handled, the cases drag on.”
Warren Hill (pictured) is scheduled to be executed on July 18 in Georgia despite being previously found intellectually disabled. The U.S. Supreme Court in Atkins v. Virgnia (2002) banned the execution of individuals with intellectual disabilities (mental retardation), but allowed each state to set guidelines for determining whether an inmate has such a condition. In Georgia, capital defendants are required to prove “mental retardation” beyond a reasonable doubt. It is the only state in the country that sets such a high burden of proof for such claims. Earlier, a state judge found that Hill was intellectually disabled, but under a lower legal threshhold than is required in the statute. In 2003, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed the judge’s ruling in a 4-3 vote, holding that Hill’s lawyers had failed to clear the threshold of “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld the Georgia Supreme Court. Writing for the majority, Judge Frank Hull said federal law "mandates that this federal court leave the Georgia Supreme Court decision alone — even if we believe it incorrect or unwise." Brian Kammer, one of Hill’s lawyers, said he will ask the Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Hill clemency. Kammer said, “Executing Warren Hill, a 52-year-old man whom a court has found to be more likely than not mentally retarded, would be a terrible miscarriage of justice.” UPDATE: On July 16, Georgia's Board of Pardons denied clemency.
In a recent op-ed in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called for the end of the death penalty. President Carter cited the risk of wrongful executions, the lack of evidence of deterrence, and the costs of prosecution as reasons to abolish capital punishment. He wrote, “[T]here has never been any evidence that the death penalty reduces capital crimes or that crimes increased when executions stopped. Tragic mistakes are prevalent. DNA testing and other factors have caused 138 death sentences to be reversed since I left the governor’s office. The cost for prosecuting executed criminals is astronomical. Since 1973, California has spent roughly $4 billion in capital cases leading to only 13 executions, amounting to about $307 million each.” President Carter also cited the unfair application of the death penalty as an especially compelling reason for repeal: “Perhaps the strongest argument against the death penalty is extreme bias against the poor, minorities or those with diminished mental capacity. Although homicide victims are six times more likely to be black rather than white, 77 percent of death penalty cases involve white victims. Also, it is hard to imagine a rich white person going to the death chamber after being defended by expensive lawyers. This demonstrates a higher value placed on the lives of white Americans.” Read full op-ed below.
In an op-ed written for the 25th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in McCleskey v. Kemp, nationally acclaimed death penalty expert James Acker (pictured) called for a reassessment of how race is affecting death penalty decisions. Prof. Acker questioned the Court's refusal to find bias in the wake of the strong statistical evidence presented in that case. He wrote, "The time has surely come for a sober reassessment of this ruling" and "we must question if justice truly has been served when racial prejudices influence capital case decisions." Acker noted that the recent case involving the shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman in Florida raises the question of "how confident [we can be] that the pernicious influence of race has been expunged from punishment by death?" Read full commentary below.
On April 20, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles reduced the death sentence of Daniel Greene (pictured) to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The Board had stayed Greene's execution, which was set for April 19, in order to further consider his clemency petition. Greene's petition included letters from several members of the Taylor County community, where the murder occurred, urging the Board to spare Greene's life. Among the letters was one from a former correctional officer, Randy Foster, who called Greene "as fine a man as I have ever met in my life," and said, "He is not like anyone else on death row. Daniel Greene is the type of person you want for an inmate. He has never given me (or anyone else as far as I know) even the hint of a problem." In his own letter to the Board, Greene apologized for the pain he caused the victim's family and said, "I was on drugs at the time, but I took the drugs with my hands, and I take the responsibility. That choice to do drugs and what I did after were the worst mistakes of my life. I do not blame the drugs. I blame myself for everything." This was the second clemency granted nationally in 2012 and the eighth granted in Georgia since 1976.
April 22 will mark the 25th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in McCleskey v. Kemp in which the Court rejected (5-4) a claim of racial bias based on a sophisticated statistical study of the death penalty in Georgia. Warren McCleskey, an African-American death row inmate convicted of killing a white police officer, presented the Court with analysis showing that defendants charged with killing white victims had odds of receiving a death sentence that were 4.3 times higher than defendants charged with killing black victims. McCleskey argued that his death sentence was unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court held, however, that the defendant had to show he was personally discriminated against in the course of the prosecution, and merely showing a disturbing pattern of racial disparities in Georgia over a long period of time was not sufficient to prove racial bias in his case. McCleskey also argued that when race is a factor in selecting who will die, the death penalty is unconstitutional under the cruel and unusual punishment clause of the Eighth Amendment, but the Court decided the study offered was insufficient to prove that the death penalty was being applied in an arbitrary manner. 
The Georgia Supreme Court recently warned Gwinnett County officials that time to try the murder case of Khahn Dinh Phan is running out. Phan had petitioned the court to dismiss his charges due to the state’s inability to fund his defense and the violation of his right to a speedy trial. His case has not been brought to trial in nearly seven years, partly because of Georgia’s financially strained indigent defense system. Attorneys for Phan, who were hired by the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council, said that they were never given money to hire experts or interview surviving eyewitnesses. In her ruling, Chief Justice Carol Hunstein (pictured) emphasized troubling issues raised by Phan’s case. Justice Hunstein wrote, “We emphasize that our determination that the trial court acted within its discretion should in no way be construed as an endorsement of the system that has led us down this tortuous path thus far. The interests of no one -- neither prosecutors nor defendants, victims nor taxpayers -- are served by the uncertainty and delay attending to a chronically underfunded indigent defense system.”
DPIC is collecting information on pending legislation related to the death penalty. For example, at least nine states will consider bills to repeal the death penalty in 2012. In California, a coalition called Taxpayers for Justice has been collecting signatures to place a death penalty repeal initiative on the ballot in November. On January 25, the Washington Senate Judiciary Committee held a public hearing on a bill to repeal the death penalty. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Debbie Regala, cited high costs as a reason for the bill: “We can keep the public safe with putting people in prison for the rest of their life, as opposed to the costly expense of executing them… It's always important and valuable for us to look at public policy and see if it's actually getting us the results that we want. When you're facing an economic crisis, you add an extra lens." Other states considering repeal bills are Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Maryland, Nebraska, and Pennsylvania. A few states, such as New Hampshire, have blls to expand the death penalty.