mental retardation and death penalty

my home state of north carolina sure has sentenced a lot of mentally retarded people to death.

in 2002, the supreme court decided that we could no longer constitutionally execute mentally retarded people.

at my future alma mater, john blume has compiled a rough list of the number of people who have had their sentences reduced from death in light of this ruling. nationally, there are 83 on the list, and guess how many north carolina claims? 16! maybe that means nc is just busier getting them off the row than other states, but i kinda doubt it.

thanks, as always to karl keys for his faithful gathering and posting.

there are three executions scheduled for this week.

link to 60 minutes on exonerations

thanks to steve houseworth for this link to a recent 60 minutes segment on texas exonerations.

about 12 minutes, this segment introduces several dna-innocent men, and raises some important questions. well worth a look.

here's a bit of the transcript:

"I have to wonder after 27 years how did you stand it?" Pelley asks.

"You can only go one day at a time ever. I don’t really know myself. I just did the best I could. Just you know every day I have hope well maybe today will be a better day," Woodard says.

"You had hope?" Pelley asks.

"That’s all a man has," Woodard says. "I had hope for parole. I think I came up about 12 times."

"When you appeared before the parole board what did they say to you?" Pelley asks.

"They always told me, as long as you deny your guilt its saying something about you, you know you are not willing to own up to your deed. And we gonna deny you," Woodard says.

But Woodard refused to admit guilt. "I wasn't guilty," he says.

"You chose truth over freedom," Pelley remarks.

"I mean, a man has to stand for something," Woodard says.

James Woodard became the 17th prisoner in Dallas to be set free after a wrongful conviction. He walked from the courthouse into a hometown he could no longer recognize. At 27 years and four months, he became the longest serving inmate in the nation to be cleared with the help of DNA.

~~~~~
update:

just re-watched this.

it's important not to focus blame on the deceased district attorney to the point that we fail to ask whether the problem is bigger than just this one guy. it is. there's good evidence that this is a systemic problem. there are dna exonerations going on everywhere. we need to examine the system.

what to do with sex offenders

there is much conversation in the legal "blawgs" (e.g., here) these days on sex offender post-release residency restrictions. i am mostly watching and listening, but i am struck by this:

this may be the best solution the political/legal world can come up with, but as a society, we can and need to do better.

can we (the public) take advantage of the current outrage against sex offenders to demand that our departments of correction actually begin to provide some sort of correction? here again, we act as if the only tool we have is a hammer. if someone breaks the law, we incarcerate them and that is supposed to deter future crime on the part of the offender and others. this seems to work for some crimes, but certainly not for others. we need to see this.

it is in our national interest, and is our responsibility to our children, to recognize that this incarceration-only approach has no effect on future sex offenses. we need to face up to what is. we are holding them, and we are squandering this chance to have an impact, instead releasing them back into society when the strong evidence is that they remain dangerous. insisting that these people live a certain distance from schools will not solve this. locking them up forever will not solve it. more rules and increased punishment will not solve it. we need to look in a different tool-kit.

for a long time, we have been content to let our corrections systems be only punitive, and to consider anything constructive (education, treatment) as "coddling." but there is another way to see this. we need to demand that -- for our sakes -- our departments of correction develop and provide effective treatment for sex offenders. we need to figure out what works and do it.

and once we do this, it is possible that we can focus on solving other problems which incarceration alone is not solving: substance abuse and violence, for example.

prison population mark

from the drug law blog late last week:

A major report from the Pew Center is out today noting the sad statistic that 1 in 100 adults is now locked up in jail or prison in this country.

if you have a second, the graphic here, which shows the racial breakdown, is worth a look. The 1 in 100 figure above includes women. For black men 20-34 the figure is 1 in 9.

1 in 9.

1 in 9.