Meanwhile, the 300th murder for Texas...

From the IHT:

The war trumps all other issues, so insufficient attention will be paid to the planned demise of Delma Banks Jr., a 43-year-old man who is scheduled in about 24 hours to become the 300th person executed in Texas since the resumption of capital punishment in 1982.

Banks, a man with no prior criminal record, is most likely innocent of the charge that put him on death row. Fearing a tragic miscarriage of justice, three former federal judges (including William Sessions, a former director of the FBI) have urged the U.S. Supreme Court to block Wednesday's execution.

So far, no one seems to be listening.

"The prosecutors in this case concealed important impeachment material from the defense," said Sessions and the other former judges, John Gibbons and Timothy Lewis, in an extraordinary friend-of-the court brief.

According to the Bedford Times Mail in Indiana, Delma Banks Jr.'s trial lawyer, Lynn Cooksey, told the trial judge at the time Banks was convicted of murder that he had done little preparation, never visited the crime scene and did not have key information that he was supposed to have gotten from the prosecutors — including the criminal records of prosecution witnesses. Cooksey presented no witnesses during the trial, relying solely on cross-examination.

In addition, Cooksey prepared no witnesses to testify on Banks' behalf at the trial's penalty phase. When an all-white jury returned a guilty verdict against the black defendant at 11 p.m., Banks' mother Ellean fainted in the courtroom. After friends revived her, she received another jolt. Cooksey told her she needed to call her minister to round up some witnesses who could testify on her son's behalf the following morning when the trial's penalty phase would commence. Several witnesses testified that Banks was a nice, church-going young man but offered little else.

A disgrace.

 

Texas Death Row Inmate Gets a Last-Minute Stay

With 12 minutes to live, the man gets a stay. Best news I've heard all day.

Just minutes before the scheduled execution tonight, the United States Supreme Court granted an indefinite stay to Delma Banks Jr., 44, a black man sent to death row after an all-white jury convicted him in the murder and robbery of a white teenager 23 years ago.

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Jim Marcus, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, which represents Texans sentenced to death, said, "Clearly, it's rare for the court to step in and stay a case at the last minute, so it's clearly troubled by one or more aspects of this case."

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Mr. Banks's prospects for a 11th-hour stay of execution appeared more hopeful than those of other inmates because a team of former federal judges and prosecutors, including William S. Sessions, a former F.B.I. director and federal judge, had appealed to the Supreme Court to halt the execution.

Mr. Sessions was joined by John J. Gibbons, former chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia; Timothy K. Lewis, a former Third Circuit judge; and Thomas Sullivan, a former United States attorney.

They cited findings, some uncovered since Mr. Banks's many earlier appeals, that included suppression of evidence, undisclosed payment of a critical witness, perjured testimony, indifferent defense counsel at the trial and racial discrimination in the jury selection.

Prosecutors never found witnesses to the crime, evidence directly tying Mr. Banks to it, or established a motive. Mr. Banks never confessed and said he was in Dallas when prosecutors said it occurred.

Fifteen years ago, he turned down a plea agreement that would have given him a life sentence with a possible parole in return for a confession. He continued to maintain his innocence.

 

How we respond to these people, in my view, says more about who we are than anything else.

Be it an individual, state or nation: if any of the above kill with intent, that's murder.

State or National killing of murderers tells the nation and the world that in the U.S., murder is okay, as long as the state empowers you to do it.

Murder is wrong, above and beyond state or federal sanction, im my opinion. This seems to be where you and I differ; I want the nation, and each state, to reflect this "higher truth," whereas you want the nation to be able to pick and choose, and are willing to kill innocent men to get "justice."

As a member of a family who suffered a gunshot murder, let me tell you: America can't provide justice in that circumstance; the "just" thing is for the dead person to be alive, happy and healthy.

America's justice system, ANY justice system, can only give you the next best thing to the just thing. Where many "advanced" nations have submitted that their vision of the next best thing is a life behind bars to think about it, America's "next best thing" is the taking of yet another life.

A real difference there.

Question One: do we, as we claim "the world's greatest nation" mantle, submit this penchant towards killing our citizens as somthing to which other nations should aspire, or as a quirk of our cultural context that should be overlooked in our desire to lead the world towards "freedom"?

Question Two: How about this: Is the death penalty unconstitutional because it by definition creates a conflict between the 8th and 14th Ammendments?

In GREGG v Georgia (1976), and many subsequent rulings, The Court has maintained that a test of "cruel AND unusual" is the historic Westen context of the execution as tool and as process (Marshall and Brennan dissented against this view, but let's run with it). In that POV, capital punishment can neither be cruel nor unusual because it has existed throughout the Western historical tradition.

Now, what IS unique is the period of time those on death row must wait to fully exercise their rights of due process. That is, it is cruel and rather unusual in the Western tradition to make a person wait for their death for as long as we do, yet the only way that a person can do that is to abdicate their 14th Ammendment rights to due process. We seem to have a constitutional dissonance of applicability. In the very conduct of the capital punishment process, either the 8th or the 14th Ammendments must be violated.

Indeed, this is the "fourth quarter" strategy of many abolition groups, but they fear to employ it on the chance that the due process protocols are wholly eliminated, which many folks want, and lots more people are killed by the state and federal goverments...