POST: 'Study shows most death sentences handed down in Louisiana are reversed,' by the Innocence Project, published on April 29, 2016. (I am attempting to obtain a link to the actual study - and will post same as soon as it is available. HL);
GIST: "A study by the Southern University Law Center’s Journal of Race, Gender and Poverty revealed earlier in the week that few Louisiana death row inmates are actually executed, since the majority have their verdicts reversed upon appeal, or are exonerated due to innocence findings. The report examined all 241 death sentences given by the state over the past three decades. Only 28 of those inmates were executed, while 127 had their sentences reversed. Of those 127, nine death row inmates were exonerated of the crimes for which they were initially sentenced to death. According to the Advocate, for a death sentence to be reversed, the trial must have been seriously flawed. The high amount of death sentences that are reversed in Louisiana reveals that the justice system in the state has serious flaws. “The reasons for the reversals run the gamut, according to the authors, with errors evident in the pretrial, guilt-finding and penalty phases. Prosecutors, defense counsel and judges all have been responsible for the errors, the study adds,” reports the Advocate"..."Frank Baumgartner, a professor at the University of North Carolina who has been studying the death penalty for 15 years, told the Advocate that, in light of these findings, it may be easier to eliminate the death penalty as an option in Louisiana. “We have to look the death penalty in the eye and understand how it truly does function,” Baumgartner told the Advocate. “Not how we wished it functioned but how it really does function. And every time we do that, it really is disturbing.”"
The entire post can be found at:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/study-shows-death-sentences-handed-louisiana-reversed/
Read the 'Advocate' story referred to above at the link below; "The “extremely high” reversal rates in parishes throughout Louisiana, combined with what political science professor Frank Baumgartner and statistician Tim Lyman call “shocking” racial discrepancies, make the state’s experience with capital punishment “deeply dysfunctional,” the study says."
http://theadvocate.com/news/neworleans/neworleansnews/15615950-123/story.html
PUBLISHER'S NOTE:
I have added a search box for content in this blog which now encompasses several thousand posts. The search box is located near the bottom of the screen just above the list of links. I am confident that this powerful search tool provided by "Blogger" will help our readers and myself get more out of the site.
The Toronto Star, my previous employer for more than twenty incredible years, has put considerable effort into exposing the harm caused by Dr. Charles Smith and his protectors - and into pushing for reform of Ontario's forensic pediatric pathology system. The Star has a "topic" section which focuses on recent stories related to Dr. Charles Smith. It can be found at:
http://www.thestar.com/topic/
Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at:
http://smithforensic.blogspot.
Please send any comments or information on other cases and issues of interest to the readers of this blog to: hlevy15@gmail.com;
Harold Levy;
Publisher: The Charles Smith Blog;
