Fixing Georgia’s death penalty
Tuesday, January 13th, 2009To legal mavens and armchair jurists alike, the November verdict in the Brian Nichols trial offered stunning evidence that the death penalty in Georgia is broken.
Courthouse killer Brian Nichols on trial
If a remorseless, mad-dog killer like Nichols is able to escape death row — after boastfully confessing to a day-long murder-and-car-jacking spree — then how can the state rationalize the planned execution of men whose decades-old convictions rest on circumstantial evidence and recanted testimony?
Anne Emanuel, for one, believes it can’t.
“The death penalty is justifiable for certain crimes, but in Georgia we’ve got huge inequities,” says Emanuel, a criminal law professor at Georgia State University who chaired an American Bar Association committee that spent two years studying the death penalty in Georgia.
That committee’s 2006 report recommended that the state suspend executions until it was able to repair cracks in the legal system to ensure that capital punishment is being applied fairly. A subsequent two-year investigation by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution determined that, over the previous decade, the process that produces death sentences in Georgia is largely arbitrary — often resulting in wildly different punishments for similar crimes.
“Getting the death penalty in Georgia is as predictable as a lightning strike,” the newspaper concluded.
Emanuel believes the recent Nichols verdict and the never-ending appeals of longtime death row inmate Troy Davis — whose innocence claims and evidence of faulty eyewitness accounts have attracted international attention — serve to underscore the need to halt executions while the state determines whether it’s even possible to salvage the legal integrity of its death penalty.
There is, however, one major drawback with this approach: It ain’t gonna happen.
