FEATURED POST

California | San Quentin begins prison reform - but not for those on death row

Image
California is transferring everyone on death row at San Quentin prison to other places, as it tries to reinvent the state's most notorious facility as a rehabilitation centre. Many in this group will now have new freedoms. But they are also asking why they've been excluded from the reform - and whether they'll be safe in new prisons. Keith Doolin still remembers the day in 2019 when workers came to dismantle one of the United States' most infamous death chambers.

Most US people executed not evil: Study

A new study shows that prisoners put to death in the US are hardly ever the worst of the worst criminals.

The study, published in Hastings Law Journal, examined 100 executions carried out between 2012 and 2013, many of these people are not cold, calculating, remorseless killers.

"A lot of folks even familiar with criminal justice and the death penalty system thought that, by the time you executed somebody, you're really gonna get these people that the court describes as the worst of the worst," Robert Smith, the study's lead researcher and an assistant professor of law at the University of North Carolina, told The Huffington Post.

"It was surprising to us just how many of the people that we found had evidence in their record suggesting that there are real problems with functional deficits that you wouldn't expect to see in people being executed," Smith added.

One of the people studied as part of the research is Daniel Cook whose mom used alcoholic drinks as well as drugs while she was pregnant with him. Cook's mother and grandparents molested him and his dad abused him by burning his genitals with a cigarette.

Even later when he was placed in foster care, a "foster parent chained him nude to a bed and raped him while other adults watched from the next room through a 1-way mirror," said Harvard Law Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.

The prosecutor who presented the death penalty case against Cook said he would never have done had he known about his brutal past. Nevertheless, he was put to death on August 8, 2012.

The US Supreme Court has found that executing inmates with an intellectual disability or severe mental illness can violate the Eighth Amendment, according to which cruel and unusual punishment are barred.

In addition, the court has found that severe childhood trauma can be a mitigating factor in a defendant's case, showed a press release accompanying the report.

Smith also noted that the courts had found, regardless of the heinousness of the crime, the prosecution must also prove the defendant is "morally culpable."

He further argued people ended up executed did not have a chance to receive adequate representation at the trial level. In other words, juries were often unaware of defendants' intellectual or mental health problems or their family history of extreme abuse.

He concluded that the reason why traumatic childhoods are raised is not necessarily aimed at making juries feel bad for the person on trial, but because of "decades of research" which shows these types of trauma can provoke the kinds of "functional deficits" that were visible in most of the cases studied in the report.

Source: Press TV, July 26, 2014

Most Viewed (Last 7 Days)

‘A Short Film About Killing’: The movie that brought an end to the Polish death penalty

California | San Quentin begins prison reform - but not for those on death row

Bali | British grandmother on death row for more than 10 years for drug smuggling given ‘one final hope of escape'

Congo reinstates death penalty after 20-year hiatus

Georgia Court Case Tests the Limits of Execution Secrecy in the United States

Georgia | Death penalty trial for accused Atlanta spa shooter in limbo

Iran | Man executed in Qazvin

Malaysia | Death sentence commuted for ex-cop who killed toddler, babysitter

Alabama | Judge formally imposes death penalty on man who gunned down Mobile cop