SUB-HEADING: "The death penalty is failing Tennesseans in multiple ways, now is the time to put an end to it."
GIST: "Thirty-four years ago, I was a Black teenage mother living on my own in Mississippi. On April 11, 1989, my worst nightmare came true.
When I went to pick up my infant son, Walter, he wasn’t breathing. I ran out of my apartment frantically yelling for help.
A neighbor came to my aid.
She told me to attempt CPR.
When Walter got to the hospital, the doctors tried to resuscitate him, but it was too late. I was subsequently arrested because the bruises left by my resuscitation attempts were mistaken for abuse.
I was put on trial the following year, represented by an attorney I’d met only once before the trial. After being judged by a panel of jurors who didn’t look like me, I was found guilty and sentenced to death.
I spent six and a half years in prison and two years and nine months on death row.
In 1995, I was exonerated after the medical examiner changed his opinion about my son’s cause of death.
Walter died because of a kidney disease, a disease one of my other children also has.
I can't tell you what it's like to lose your child and then be blamed for his death because in the worst moment of my life, when I was desperately trying to save my baby, I didn’t perform CPR correctly for an infant and inadvertently bruised him.
Families are trapped in trauma for decades
I am a living testament to the failure of the death penalty system.
I am alive, not because the system works, but despite its best efforts to execute me.
My story is not unique. Since 1972, 192 people have been exonerated and released from death rows when evidence of innocence was finally considered, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
That is one person exonerated for every 8.2 people who were executed.
Regardless of whether or not one believes that the death penalty is justified, our current system cannot be trusted to determine who lives and who dies.
It is just too broken.
Even though the death penalty costs Tennessee taxpayers millions more per case than alternative sentences, errors are still made, and the surviving families of murder victims spend decades in a legal process that keeps them trapped in their trauma.
Alternative sentences would provide legal finality much sooner, sometimes as soon as the trial is over
A new Death Penalty Information Center report titled, “Doomed to Repeat: The Legacy of Race in Tennessee’s Death Penalty” also reveals the ugly racial history of Tennessee’s death penalty and how that history continues to impact today’s system.
The report tracks the origins of the use of the death penalty to lynching and other forms of racial violence directed at Black Tennesseans.
The report notes that Shelby County is responsible for much of our state’s death sentencing.
Despite compromising only 13% of Tennessee’s population, Shelby County is responsible for one-third of all the state’s death sentences and half of today’s death row population.
Further, 60% of death sentences for Black defendants in the state are from Shelby County.
Across Tennessee, though almost 60% of homicide victims are Black, 74% of death sentences imposed since 1972 are for crimes involving white victims.
State is wasting money on executions instead of early intervention
Consider also that earlier this year, State House Representative Paul Sherrell suggested that hanging people from trees would be an acceptable execution method.
If Tennesseans want to embrace a culture of life and not risk the death of innocent people like me, we must stop relying on this relic from the past that has been used to disproportionately punish Black people.
We must work together to find effective responses to crime, instead of relying on hollow rhetoric.
Spending millions of dollars seeking executions for people who are already in prison instead of investing in trauma-informed solutions that actually improve public safety and focus on accountability, mental health and early intervention is both ineffective and wasteful.
We should be solving more crimes, and we should get victims of violence and surviving families of murder victims the resources they need to heal so their healing isn't reliant on what happens to the people who've caused them harm.
The death penalty is failing Tennesseans in multiple ways. Now is the time to put an end to it."
The entire commentary can be read at:
———————————————————————
PASSAGE OF THE DAY: National Registry of Exonerations: "
Butler later described her interrogation by a detective.
“I was alone with no lawyer or parent with me. I told him I tried to save my baby. He wrote down what I said and threw it in the garbage. He yelled at me for three hours. No matter what I said, he screamed over and over that I had killed my baby. I was terrified. I was put in jail and not allowed to attend Walter’s funeral."
“I was a teenager who, less than 24 hours before, had lost my precious baby boy. Ambitious men questioned, demoralized and intimidated me. In that state of mind, I signed the lies they wrote on a piece of paper. I signed my name in tiny letters in the margin to show some form of resistance to the power they had over me.”"
Read the National Registry of Exonerations entry by Maurice Possley (August 21, 2019) at the link below: (Contributing factors: "False Confession, False or Misleading Forensic Evidence, Official Misconduct.)
GIST: "Shortly after midnight on April 12, 1989, 18-year-old Sabrina Butler rushed into the Columbus, Mississippi hospital with her lifeless nine-month-old son, Walter.
https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/casedetail.aspx?caseid=3078
-------------------------------------------------------------
PUBLISHER'S NOTE: I am monitoring this case/issue/resource. Keep your eye on the Charles Smith Blog for reports on developments. 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/charlessmith. Information on "The Charles Smith Blog Award"- and its nomination process - can be found at: http://smithforensic.blogspot.com/2011/05/charles-smith-blog-award-nominations.html 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;
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
—————————————————————————————————
FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
------------------------------------------------------------------
YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
