Public Defense

Innocents on Death Row: Who?s counting?

By Gideon

John Holdridge, who argued State v. Courchesne last month before the (CT) Supreme Court, has this opinion piece at HuffPo, arguing that the number of exonerations from death row make a strong case for a moratorium on the death penalty.

One of the primary reasons is the recent explosion in the number of death-row exonerations, which the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) now puts at 127. In response, some proponents of capital punishment have taken to arguing that many of the freed death-row prisoners are not in fact innocent.

The rest of the article is a good read (or riddled with inaccuracies, if you’re a proponent), but this last sentence piqued my curiosity. What do you consider to be “innocence”, when talking about exonerations? Do you restrict this definition to factual innocence or should it include legal innocence as well?

The DPIC number comes from the inclusive definition of “innocence”. I take factual innocence to mean that there is no credible evidence of an individual’s guilt. How is this different from legal innocence and why is such a distinction necessary or even worthwhile?

In 2005 testimony before Congress, [Oregon prosecutor Joshua] Marquis submitted a document [PDF ]which denied that my former client, Michael Ray Graham, and his co-defendant Albert Burrell were released from Louisiana’s death row because they were innocent. The author of the document claimed that they were released “only because there was insufficient evidence of guilt.” In fact, Graham and Burrell were released after the Louisiana Attorney General’s Office informed a court that there was “a total lack of credible evidence linking Graham and/or Burrell to the crime.”

So, what do you think?

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Full post as published by A Public Defender on April 09, 2008 (boomark / email).