The New Hampshire Commission to Study the Death Penalty held a hearing on September 16 at Keene State College, inviting the public to share their views on whether the state should repeal the death penalty. Among those testifying were a retired police chief, a former prisoner, and the mother of a murder victim, all of whom spoke against capital punishment. Margaret Hawthorn, whose daughter was murdered last April, told the Commission that she did not want her daughter’s killer to be put to death. “The best possible outcome for me would be for there to be no more death. One was enough.” Mark Edgington, who served time in a Florida prison, said his time as an inmate changed him from a supporter to an opponent of capital punishment. Edgington said that in his experience the death penalty is not an effective deterrent: “Having spent 9 years in prison, let me tell you, those men don’t care about your deterrents.” Former Marlborough police chief Raymont Dodge agreed with Edgington, saying that people who commit crimes do not weigh the pros and cons beforehand. Dodge also cited wrongful convictions as a serious concern: “We can release an innocent person from jail. We cannot release an innocent person from the grave.” The Commission is scheduled to release its report to the legislature in December.
In the May 9 issue of The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin examines the drop in death sentences in Texas and focuses particularly on the mitigation work being done by the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE) in Houston, headed by Danalynn Recer. Toobin cites a number of possible reasons for the drop in death sentences in Texas, including "the increasing use of mitigation, a strategy that aims to tell the defendant’s life story." The article provides a number of examples where Recer's organization presented evidence from a defendant's background, such as childhood abuse or brain damage, and convinced a jury to choose a life sentence over the death penalty, even for the murder of a police officer. Recer summed up her work, "The idea was to improve the way capital trials were done in Texas, to start an office that would bring the best practices from other places and put them to work here....It is possible to persuade a jury to value someone's life."
Brandon Rhode, a Georgia death row inmate, who was scheduled for execution on September 21, received a temporary stay after he attempted to commit suicide. The Georgia Supreme Court granted a stay until September 24 to allow Rhode access to counsel after he was taken to the hospital on the day of his scheduled execution. His attorney filed a motion stating that his client is incompetent, and his execution would violate standards of cruel and unusual punishment. In the court filing, Rhode's lawyers said Rhode suffered from brain impairments associated with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder because his mother was drinking alcohol and taking drugs until she found out she was pregnant well into her second trimester. The motion asserted that Rhode should not be executed because his brain damage "rendered him incapable of the requisite level of culpability required to justify execution.”
A new book by David Garland, “Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition,” offers a fresh perspective on why the death penalty endures in the United States when so many other countries in the Western world have already abolished it. The book seeks to understand the persistence of the death penalty in the U.S. as a social fact, using sociological, historical and legal analyses to explain the unique and peculiar manner in which the death penalty is applied. Garland concludes that the death penalty has survived in the United States because it is deeply connected to the fundamentally American institutions of local autonomy and popular democracy. Anthony Amsterdam, Professor of Law at New York University, said of this book, “This is indispensable reading for students of criminal justice, race, and American culture, for lawyers and judges in the pathways of death, and for all who want to understand why our country can neither put capital punishment to any good use nor put an end to it.”
