Dear Friend(s) of Abolition,
There’s a river of doubt wearing away at the death penalty.
Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton sided with the majority of Kentuckians today
and commuted Kevin Stanford's death sentence — imposed for a crime he
committed as a juvenile — to life in prison without the possibility of
probation or parole.
Gov. Patton's action followed a precedent-setting decision from August
2003, when the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the death sentence of
a juvenile offender, Christopher Simmons. The court found that "a national
consensus has developed against the execution of juvenile offenders" and
cited the number of states that have banned the practice. Thirty-eight
states retain the death penalty. Of these, 16 abolished it for juveniles.
The U.S. House of Representatives agreed Nov. 12, 2003, to provide
more than $1 billion for DNA testing to help prove the innocence of some
death row inmates and the guilt of rapists and killers who may have gone
free.
A Maryland man, Keith Wiggins, is getting a new sentencing hearing after
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last June that the performance of his
defense counsel did not meet minimum standards as guaranteed by the
Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Prosecutorial misconduct has undone at least five North Carolina death
row sentences in recent years, and several similar cases are grinding their
way through the appeals process.
Four years after convicting and sentencing a Corpus Christi, Texas, man
to death, a scientist admitted that he was wrong about the DNA results
concerning one piece of evidence used at Richard Vasquez's 1999 capital
murder trial. Other experts said that at best he was “misleading the jury; at
worst, he was misinterpreting the results of testing," according to court
papers.
In January 2003, Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. called
for the abolition of the death penalty, saying, “capital punishment comes
only at the intolerable risk of killing an innocent person."
With the June 2003 release of Joseph Amrine of Missouri from prison, at
least 111 people have now been freed from death row due to wrongful
convictions or actual innocence, more evidence that the use of the death
penalty is an egregiously flawed and error-prone public policy.
This kind of news raises more and more doubts about the fairness and
effectiveness of the death penalty, and experts say that doubt is the key to doing
away with the death penalty once and for all. That's because studies show that
people who let themselves have doubts about the death penalty begin to change
their minds...and that when people begin to change their minds, it's a question of
when—not if—the barbarism of the death penalty will end.
Raising doubts about the death penalty may be an effective abolition strategy—
maybe the most effective—but it’s an emotional, time-consuming process,
because people need to be given a place to talk about their doubts and plenty of
time to process those doubts.
It's also expensive.
And that’s where you come in. If we’re going to foster the kind of public
discussions that raise the doubts that lead to abolition of the death penalty in
Kentucky, then we’re going to need your financial support.
We need your financial support—today.
e We need your financial support to turn up the heat on our lawmakers in
Frankfort during the upcoming session of the General Assembly.
e We need your financial support to reach more members of Kentucky’s
faith community more forcefully than ever before.
e We need your financial support to get the abolition message to the media
in every part of the Commonwealth, so that the volume of doubt gets
turned up.
We need your financial support to continue the campaign that began in Kentucky
with the re-introduction of the death penalty as a sentencing option in 1976. This
was the KCADP-led campaign that was instrumental in passing legislation
forbidding the execution of the mentally retarded in Kentucky in 1990 and that, in
1998, paved the way for passage of the first racial justice act in the country.
So, write a check. Renew your membership in the Kentucky Coalition to Abolish
the Death Penalty. If your membership is current, then write another check.
| wrote a check today. Please join me and hundreds of others in showing your
financial support for an end to the death penalty in Kentucky
Write a check today and be heard.
Sincerely,
Rev. Patrick Delahanty
Chair
Kentucky Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty
PS: KCADP is grateful for the financial support it’s gotten in the past and
for the role people like you have played in its successes. It’s time for you
to help turn up the volume and get people talking about the doubts they
have about the death penalty in Kentucky. It’s our best chance to do away
with it.
