Wrongly sentenced to death, and sometimes wrongly executed, this would certainly be considered a miscarriage of justice!
Perhaps one of the most disturbing aspects of capital punishment is the certainty that must accompany the sentence.
One must be dead certain (no pun intended) of a person’s guilt before sending a man (or woman or child) to his death.
Unfortunately, this “certainty” is often omitted or overlooked, especially when other factors like politics or racial hatred, among others, take priority.
Another surprising factor that has led, and still does, to wrongful convictions involving the death sentences (and otherwise) is the amount of shoddy police work, for which nobody is held accountable even though lives have been ruined, people have died and millions of dollars spent on a false and shameful mockery of justice.
Since 1976, 1,575 people have been executed in the United States, and 150 of those have been exonerated as of December 10, 2014 in 26 different States.
There’s no telling how many more were innocent.
Let’s look at 10 people who were wrongly sentenced to death.
Chipita Rodriguez
“Justice denied anywhere diminishes justice everywhere.”
Martin Luther King Jr.
The first woman ever to be executed in the state of Texas, Chipita, a Mexican-American, was executed by hanging in 1863.
She and her son (possibly illegitimate) were accused of murdering a traveller named John Savage with an axe to rob him of $600 of gold.
Savage’s body turned up down river along with the sack of money.
Throughout the trial, Rodriguez maintained her innocence, but refused to testify in her defense and remained silent throughout the trial.
It is believed that she was protecting her guilty son.
When the trail was over, the jury recommended mercy, but the judge ordered her executed anyway.
If walls of justice could talk, would they confess to the screams of the wrongfully condemned?
She was hanged from a mesquite tree at the age of 63. Her last words were, “No soy culpable” (I am not guilty).
Her unfair trial and wrongful execution have spawned operas, books and articles.
There are even ghost stories from people who claim to have seen her ghost riding through the mesquite trees or wailing from the river bottoms.
In 1985, the Texas state legislature passed a resolution noting that Rodriguez did not receive a fair trial.
Charles Hudspeth
Hudspeth was convicted of murdering George Watkins in Marion County, Arkansas in 1887 and was sentenced to death by hanging.
Hudspeth was having an affair with Watkins’ wife, Rebecca, until Watkins disappeared.
The police grew suspicious and arrested the two lovebirds.
If love is blind, is justice any clearer when tainted by the heart's deceit?
After much interrogation, Rebecca accused Hudspeth of murdering her husband to get him out of the way so they could be married.
Hudspeth was tried twice with the same results: conviction and death sentence.
He was hanged in 1892, even though George Watkins was alive and well living in Kansas.
Thomas and Meeks Griffin
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The 1913 murder of 75-year-old John Q. Lewis brought the Griffin brothers, the wealthiest black farmers in Chester County, South Carolina, up against a judge.
They were convicted and sentenced to die on the electric chair based on the accusations of another black man, John “Monk” Stevenson, a small-time crook.
Stevenson, who was found in possession of the victim’s pistol, was sentenced to life in prison in exchange for testifying against the brothers.
Despite overwhelming evidence and support against their conviction, systemic biases sealed their tragic end, leaving a black mark on history.
Over 100 people, including Blackstock’s mayor, a sheriff, two trial jurors and the grand jury foreman, petitioned Gov.
Richard Manning to commute the brothers’ sentence. Nevertheless, they were sent to the electric chair in 1915.
Thomas Griffin and Meeks Griffin were pardoned in October 2009 after Tom Joyner sought the pardons of his great-uncles from a state appeals court in Columbia, South Carolina.
Joe Arridy
“[A]n overwhelming body of evidence indicates the 23-year-old Arridy was innocent, including false and coerced confessions, the likelihood that Arridy was not in Pueblo at the time of the killing, and an admission of guilt by someone else.”
With these words, the Governor of Colorado, Bill Ritter, officially and posthumously pardoned mentally disabled defendant Joe Arridy in 2011.
Arridy was wrongly executed for crime of murdering and raping 15-year-old Dorothy Drain with a hatchet in 1936.
Dubbed the "happiest man on death row," Arridy's obliviousness to his fate serves as a heartbreaking reminder of the vulnerabilities of certain individuals in the face of judicial processes.
In 2011, Gov. Bill Ritter posthumously pardoned Arridy.
Ritter also emphasized Arridy’s intellectual disabilities as another factor that would point to his innocence.
Arridy had an IQ of 46, which was equal to the mental age of a 6-year-old, and didn’t even understand that he was going to be executed.
The New York Daily News called Joe Arridy “the happiest man on death row.”
George Stinney
“The dead cannot cry out for justice. It is a duty of the living to do so for them.”
Lois McMaster Bujold
Stinney, a 14-year-old black boy, was convicted of the first-degree murder of two pre-teen white girls by an all white jury in one of the most egregious cases of miscarriage of justice ever, and, consequently, was the youngest person to be executed in the U.S. in the 20th century.
How many lost childhoods does it take to realise that justice isn't just about verdicts, but about equity?
There was no physical evidence in the case, and the sole evidence against Stinney was the circumstantial fact the girls had spoken with Stinney and his sister shortly before their murder and the testimony of three police officers who claimed that Stinney had confessed to the murders.
On December 17, 2014, Stinney’s conviction was vacated by circuit court judge Carmen Mullen, effectively clearing his name.
Jesse Tafero
Tafero and his partner, Sunny Jacobs, were convicted of murdering two Florida Highway Patrol officers and sentenced to death via the electric chair in May 1990 in the state of Florida.
The officers were killed during a traffic stop where Tafero, his girlfriend Sunny Jacobs, their children and another passenger, Walter Rhodes, were sleeping in a car by the side of a road.
Rhodes later confessed to shooting the officers after Tafero’s execution.
Jesse Tafero's case exemplifies the tragic repercussions of hasty judgments, where the irreversible punishment of death leaves no room for the emergence of truth.
Jacobs’ conviction was overturned in 1992 after a recreation of the crime scene indicated a third person had committed the murders.
By all accounts, Tefaro’s execution was gruesome and deliberately cruel.
He was electrocuted on “Old Sparky,” the state’s electric chair, which malfunctioned, causing six-inch flames to rise from his head.
A fellow inmate stated that the ward smelled of his dead friend’s burning flesh for days.
Carlos DeLuna
DeLuna has not been posthumously exonerated, but the case has attracted a lot of attention from abolitionist groups who consider it to be an example of wrongful execution.
Columbia University law professor James Liebman released a report of the case claiming that he and a team of students have proven DeLuna’s innocence.
DeLuna was tried, convicted and executed for the murder of 24-year-old Wanda Lopez, a gas station attendant.
She was brutally stabbed to death during a gas station robbery.
DeLuna's conviction and subsequent execution, despite glaring inconsistencies and the possible existence of a more likely suspect, shed light on the dangers of basing judgments on shaky evidence.
Eyewitnesses identified DeLuna though the testimonies from these witnesses were contradictory.
Among other evidence, DeLuna did not have any blood on his clothing or shoes at the time of arrest despite an extensively bloody crime scene, including footprints from the assailant and blood spatter on the wall.
Liebman believes that another man in town, Carlos Hernandez, who bore a striking resemblance to DeLuna, was the likely killer.
Kirk Bloodsworth
“Justice is truth in action.”
Benjamin Disraeli
Thanks to DNA testing, Bloodsworth is a free man.
He also became the first American sentenced to death row to be exonerated through DNA testing, which at the time of the crime he was accused of was still a novel technique.
Bloodsworth was convicted in 1985 of sexual assault, rape, and first-degree premeditated murder of a nine-year-old girl in Rosedale, Maryland.
The crime was committed in 1984. Bloodsworth maintained his innocence even after 5 people testified that he had been with the victim.
Are our memories and testimonies truly reliable when the price to pay is a person's freedom or life?
While in jail in 1992, he read about DNA fingerprinting in a case that led to a conviction, and fought to have the same testing method applied to his case.
The DNA fingerprinting carried out on the traces of semen in the victim’s underwear did not match Bloodsworth’s DNA profile.
Bloodsworth was released in 1993 after having spent 9 years in prison, 2 of them on death row.
Earl Washington Jr.
In a case riddled with holes and incompetence, Earl Washington Jr., a man with an IQ of 69 and intellectually disabled, received a full pardon from the governor of Virginia after spending 18 years in prison, half of it on death row.
Washington was convicted of the rape and murder of Rebecca Lyn Williams in 1982. Investigators coerced Washington into falsely confessing for the crimes despite knowing of his intellectual disability and that they were coaching him.
New evidence previously withheld showed that Washington could not have contributed to the crime, nor did the fingerprints and palm prints found at the scene match his, which prompted the governor to commute his sentence to life 9 days before his scheduled execution.
The sheer fact that an intellectually disabled man was pushed into confessing a crime he didn't commit exposes a justice system fraught with cracks.
He was still considered an accomplice and had to spend 6 more years in prison.
Finally, new, more sophisticated DNA testing was introduced proving his innocence.
In 2000, Governor Gilmore announced the results of the new tests and granted Washington a full pardon.
Alan Gell
Gell was convicted and sentenced to death in the murder of Allen Ray Jenkins in North Carolina, whose body was found on April 14, 1995 (the exact date is important here).
When questioned, some of Jenkins’ neighbors and other witnesses said they had seen him alive as late as April 10.
Despite this, police settled on April 3 as the date of the crime.
Now, Gell had been away the entire month of April, except for one day—April 3.
Meanwhile, two 15-year-old girls, one of them Gell’s girlfriend, testified they saw Gell shooting Jenkins with a shotgun on April 3.
They stated they had called Gell asking him to come to Jenkins’ house to help them rob Jenkins. During the trial both girls were offered a plea bargain.
Pleading guilty to second-degree murder, they would both receive 10 years in prison.
The question lingers: how many Alan Gells are still imprisoned, awaiting their truth to emerge from the shadows of a flawed system?
Although police had no certain date of death for Jenkins, prosecutors hitched their timeline to that date, and later, Gell was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Gell’s conviction was overturned after it was later discovered that prosecutors had withheld exculpatory evidence, including the testimony of 17 witnesses who said they had seen Jenkins alive after that date as well as a tape recording of one of the girls saying that she had to make up a story to tell the police.
Gell was retried and acquitted of all charges.
Question absolutes, question justice
In the nation that touts its commitment to justice and liberty, the stories of innocent person on death row stand as somber warnings that justice can, indeed, falter.
Ah, sweet hypocrisy! The “home of the brave” occasionally dooms its own to the most severe penalty, not due to irrefutable proof, but often because of unreliable evidence, systemic prejudice, or sheer incompetence. It’s tragedy masquerading as farce, where the final act is a life wrongly terminated.
So the next time someone raves about the unerring nature of our legal system, let these cautionary tales simmer in your thoughts:
Is it prudent to deal in ultimate outcomes like life and death when we lack the assurance of absolute certainty?
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