Clay challenges Blunt to put moratorium on death penalty
By Meliqueica Meadows
Of the St. Louis American
In 1995, the state of Missouri may have executed an innocent man. In 1980 Larry Griffin was sentenced to die for the murder of a 19-year-old drug dealer. Like many inmates, Griffin maintained his innocence until his death, but many years after his execution, new evidence surfaced and key witnesses changed their initial stories. Just last year, St. Louis City Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce re-opened the case.
There was no evidence against Griffin, and the conviction has been criticized worldwide. Griffin’s case, and others like it, were discussed last Friday at the sixth annual Access to Equal Justice conference hosted by Washington University School of Law and U.S. Rep. Wm. Lacy Clay.
“I want the state to be safe and not sorry,” said Clay, a strong and outspoken opponent of the death penalty. He said he would like to see Gov. Matt Blunt create a commission to investigate the state’s current death row cases.
“I oppose the death penalty, because I know people are getting put to death just because they cannot afford adequate legal defense,” Clay said.
“A lot of these cases were rushed to court. We need to go back and take each case on death row and do due diligence.”
Many death penalty opponents feel Marlin Gray, a co-defendant in the infamous Chain of Rocks Bridge Case, was wrongfully executed in October 2005.
In the Larry Griffin case, Clay said he interviewed one of the shooting victims and the first police officer on the scene. “They both had amazing stories,” Clay said.
“The cop’s story had changed totally. And the victim broke down crying in my office.”
Clay said the state should exhaust all possible investigations and examinations of evidence before an execution takes place.
“We have a temporary moratorium put on by a federal judge,” Clay said, referring to an injunction based on the state’s inhumane method of administering lethal injections.
“But the governor should call for a moratorium on the death penalty.”
Wrongful death in Texas
According to evidence presented at the conference, Missouri isn’t the only state that may have rushed to judgement and executed an innocent person. Texas has been plagued with irregularities involving executions.
In 2004, Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted and executed for the arson-murders of his three daughters. The death penalty was based on interpretations by fire investigators that have been scientifically disproved.
Over a decade before, Ruben Cantu was executed for a murder that occurred when he was 17. During the years following the conviction, the surviving victim, the co-defendant, the district attorney and the jury forewoman made public statements that cast doubt on Cantu’s guilty verdict and death sentence.
And in 1989, Carlos DeLuna was executed for knifing Wanda Lopez to death in a robbery at a Corpus Christi convenience store six years earlier. Claims of unreliable eyewitness identification and inadequate representation raise serious concerns about his conviction and execution.
These are just a few examples of the many faulty convictions that land many men and women, largely poor and minority, on death row. It is these convictions that Barry Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld work to overturn with their Innocence Project, a non-profit legal clinic and criminal justice resource center, which has exonerated 187 wrongly convicted inmates.
“It tells you there’s a lot of injustice in the way capital punishment is meted out and it needs to be highlighted,” Clay said.
“People are still being executed without the sureness that these are the people that committed these crimes.”
Rick Sindel said it will take a change in society to fix what he called a flawed legal system that “feeds our society’s desire to be racist, to categorize people and to label them.”
Sindel, a St. Louis attorney who worked on the Ellen Reasonover case, assisted in her exoneration after 18 years of incarceration.
“The claws that try to hold onto that conviction are incredibly hard to bend back,” he said. But that doesn’t stop Sindel, Scheck or the other attorneys who work tirelessly to exonerate the innocent.
“It’s a lot easier for society to think that we got it right and that the system works,” Sindel said.
“It’s hard to convince society that what they like to believe isn’t always true, and it’s even harder to convince the courts of the same thing.”
For more information about The Innocence Project, visit www.innocenceproject.org.
