gala event success story
TRANSCRIPT
Sentry The
P1 / Annual Awards Dinner
The 23rd Annual Awards
Dinner honored those who
have worked to highlight and
correct injustice.
P2 / Upcoming DPF Events
Death Penalty Focus is gear-
ing up for summer and fall.
Find out what’s happening in
the next few months
P3 / A Stark Reminder
Recent events shed light
on why it’s past time for
California to end the death
penalty
P4 / How to Stop a Heart
The sister of a man accused
of killing his wife must imag-
ine what it would be like to
see her brother executed
IS065 JUNE 2014
By David Crawford
On Tuesday, April 15, nearly 400 people
gathered at the Beverly Hilton for the
23rd Annual Death Penalty Focus Annual
Awards Dinner. Among the award recipi-
ents were Maryland Gov. Martin O’Mal-
ley, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture
Juan Méndez, Actor Peter Sarsgaard, and
Capital Appellate Project Executive Di-
rector Michael Millman.
“What a wonderful, touching, thought-
provoking event,” said DPF President
Mike Farrell. “To be moved from laugh-
ter to tears and back again and go home
with a feeling of hopeful possibility is in
the finest tradition of these Death Penal-
ty Focus dinners. And for all the glamor
and star-power in the room, nothing was
>> CONT. PAGE TWO
To be moved from laughter to tears and
back again and go home with a feeling of
hopeful possibility is in the finest tradition of
these Death Penalty Focus dinners.
“
”
TOGETHER FOR A CAUSE The 23rd Annual Awards Dinner brought to-
gether stars, activists, and exonerees to fight
for the abolition of the death penalty in Califor-
nia, the nation, and the rest of the world.
more impressive than the group of exonerees
who stood to be recognized, their courage and
commitment electrifying the evening.”
Michael Millman, the Executive Director of the
California Appellate Project, was honored with a
Lifetime Achievement Award. Due to his physi-
cian’s orders, Millman was unable to attend the
event, but in a moving speech he wrote about
his decades of work providing legal representa-
tion for indigent appellants, he noted that “the
death penalty is not who we are, or at least, not
who we should be.”
UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Méndez
accepted the Human Rights Award for his work
exposing human rights violations in prisons in
the US and around the world. Méndez recently
studied the use of solitary confinement in US
correctional facilities and concluded that as little
as 15 days amounted to torture.
Peter Sarsgaard accepted the Justice in the Arts
Award on behalf of the cast and crew of The
Killing. Sarsgaard played an innocent death row
prisoner in the program’s third season. A power-
ful clip from the penultimate episode left the
audience speechless.
An inspiring evening >> CONT. FROM PAGE ONE
The death penalty is not who we
are, or at least, not who we
should be.
“
” Finally, the Mario Cuomo Acts of Courage
Award went to Maryland Governor Martin
O’Malley for spearheading his state’s effort to
repeal the death penalty in 2013. Governor
O’Malley stressed his belief that the death
penalty does not comport with the American
values of progress and equal justice.
For the first time, Death Penalty Focus also
handed out Honorable Mention Awards. These
awardees consisted of victims of crime, ex-
onerees, and committed professionals who
offered indispensable pro-bono services.
The event highlighted the deep, fundamental
problems with capital punishment around the
world and in the US especially. Although this
was the 23rd iteration of the Annual Awards
Dinner, many attendees remarked that it this
was the most spirited and significant in recent
memory. Additionally, the evening’s fundraiser
was the most successful in DPF’s history, net-
ting over five times more than previous fund-
raisers.
Death Penalty Focus thanks all who supported
and attended the 23rd Annual Awards Dinner.
August 13 will mark half a century since the last execution took place in the UK. DPF is launch-
ing a new campaign, “50 Years without Death,” to give people the opportunity to explore this
subject with experts and famous Britons. Visit www.uk50.org for more information.
It is well known that California’s death penalty system is broken beyond repair, and this will be
all the more apparent when the number of inmates reaches 750 sometime this summer. DPF
will issue new, sharable infographics to show why there is no sense in trying to prop up a failed
system and so that you can help spread the word about California’s broken death penalty.
DPF will launch its first annual Death Penalty Focus Week to focus attention on the various
problems with capital punishment and on the people working to end it. The week will start on
October 4 and end on October 10, coinciding with World Day Against the Death Penalty. More
information about events and ways to get involved in the next few months will be posted on
www.deathpenalty.org/week. Stay tuned!
50 Years W i thout Execut ions
Death Penal t y Focus W eek
Activists gather in Sacramento to protest the use of
the death penalty. Be sure to stay tuned over the
summer for ways you can get involved with Death
Penalty Focus!
Exonerees, DPF Justice
Advocates and Honorable
Mention award recipients
attended the 23rd Annual
Awards Dinner. Their
willingness to help the effort
to end the death penalty has
propelled this movement
forward.
Upcoming DPF Events
Cal i fornia About to Hi t Gr im Mi lestone
New Study Shows Shock-ing Innocence Estimates
Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, there have been 144 innocent
people freed from death row across the country. That number is astonishing, but
it begs the question – how many more innocent people still remain on death row? And how many innocent people
have we actually sent to their death? A new study, which appeared in the
esteemed Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, sought to deter-mine the number of innocent people on
death row in the United States. Using a sophisticated biostatistics method called “survival analysis” and data from three
independent sources, researchers came up with a shocking number. They esti-mate that 1 in 25 death row inmates
may be innocent, a 4% rate of wrongful conviction.
The study could not determine a num-ber of wrongfully executed inmates. Researchers noted that the rate would
likely be below the 4% of wrongful death row convictions, due to many inmates receiving reduced sentences in cases
with doubt. However, researchers not-ed that it is all but certain that at least several of the 1,320 executed people
since 1977 were innocent. The study takes aim at Supreme Court
Justice Antonin Scalia, who claimed in 2007 that American criminal convictions
have an “error rate of 0.027 percent.” The study said Scalia's numbers "would
be comforting, if true," but added: "The rate of error among death sentences is far greater than Justice Scalia's reas-
suring 0.027 percent," based on the number of death row exonerations that have already occurred.
One of those exonerations just occurred in March. Glenn Ford spent 30 years
behind bars in Louisiana, awaiting exe-cution for a murder he did not commit. His trial was filled with racial bias, inef-
fective assistance of counsel, and un-constitutional suppression of evidence.
This study shows that Ford’s story is, sadly, not unique. The only way to pre-vent innocent people from being sen-
tenced to death and executed is to end the death penalty.
1 in 25 Death Row Inmates May Be Innocent
A Stark Reminder that Death Penalty is Broken By Matt Cherry
We have recently had two horrific remind-
ers why California's death penalty system -
the largest and most expensive in the coun-
try - is broken beyond repair.
On April 28, the Proceedings of the Nation-
al Academy of Sciences published "a con-
servative estimate" that 4.1 percent of those
sentenced to death are innocent. We may
never know how many innocent people al-
ready have been executed. But we can say
that if 1 in 25 of California's 746 death row
inmates are not guilty, then 30 innocent
people may be in line to be killed by our
state. For the only form of punishment that
is completely irreversible, that's 30 too
many.
The very next day, we saw the grisly conse-
quences of the secrecy, incompetence, and
political posturing that surround the practice
of capital punishment. Oklahoma botched
the killing of Clayton Lockett so badly that,
after failing to end his life, the state declared
it would abandon the execution, only for
Lockett to then die from a massive heart
attack.
When Oklahoma's Supreme Court stopped
executions until it could rule on their consti-
tutionality, the governor said she would
ignore the ruling. A state representative then
began impeachment proceedings against the
court's justices for their efforts to protect the
rule of law. The intimidation worked, and
the court allowed the execution to go
ahead.
As a horrified world now knows, the ex-
perimental cocktail failed.
California's death penalty system is bro-
ken too. Unlike Oklahoma, our state has
respected court rulings against its lethal
injection protocol. Even if a constitutional
protocol is developed, the lack of drugs
makes it doubtful that executions could
resume. Meanwhile, since 1978, the death
penalty system has cost California $4 bil-
lion more than the alternative of life with-
out parole.
This year, three former California gover-
nors said our death penalty system is bro-
ken. They proposed changing the state
Constitution to reduce the time and re-
sources for convicts to appeal their inno-
cence, while increasing the secrecy sur-
rounding the execution process. In other
words, they want California's death penal-
ty to look more like Oklahoma's.
No wonder their proposal failed to qualify
for the upcoming election. Even people
who support capital punishment in princi-
ple are turning against it in practice. The
broken death penalty system cannot be
fixed. It is safer and more workable to end
the death penalty and make life without
parole the ultimate punishment.
This opinion piece originally ran in the
San Francisco Chronicle on May 14,
2014. You can see the original piece here.
San Quentin State Prison is home to California’s death row. Executions have been on hold in California since 2006, and the state currently has no execution protocol. Other states, meanwhile, have resorted to untested drugs from secret suppliers, which has resulted in botched executions and constitutional concerns.
By Mary DeMocker Arizona wants to kill my brother. The county attorney, sheriff, police officers, and prosecutors hope to strap Steve to a gurney and, in front of spectators, fill his veins with poison that stops his heart. We don’t know whether he might first suffer agonizing pain.
Steve’s main occupation as he paces in jail (we can’t raise the $2.5 million bail) is terror management. My brother, professor-turned-financier, is a planner and worrier. He worries about our parents—Dad the radiologist, Mom the retired minister, both 82—and how anxiety strains their aging hearts. He frets over his daughters, al-ready grieving their mom.
All of this, taken alone, is disturbing—why taunt a human for years with his own execution? But on top of that, Steve didn’t murder anyone.
Prosecutors, I’ve learned, overcharge murder in hopes defendants “plead out” at a come-to-Jesus chat; you’re busted, here’s our evi-dence, ‘fess up and we’ll drop the death penalty. When Steve re-fused, sure innocence would save him, he made the ultimate gam-ble. At first I believed things would get sorted out. Authorities just goofed. But Steve’s defense—that investigators let the murderer escape when they dropped other leads to focus on the ex-husband—enraged law enforcement. Nothing prepared me for their bloodlust.
I don’t understand it, since the usual evidence placing a suspect at the crime—DNA, fingerprints, blood, weapon, confession, wit-ness—doesn’t exist. Other men’s DNA was under Carol’s finger-nails. Instead of being troubled, the prosecution seems oddly exhil-arated; somehow, exculpating evidence proves Steve is a criminal mastermind.
The public generally swallows this. Steve’s supporters vanished after media were fed key fabrications. After online news articles, readers comment cruelly and anonymously— a virtual lynch mob circling 24/7.
Don’t respond, lawyers warn, so I don’t, despite the overwhelming urge to howl my rage. Every night after tucking kids into bed, I trawl the internet for signs that truth will leak out and sanity will prevail. When I read comments like, “String ’im high!” I wonder what kind of person would heap terror onto our grief over losing Carol.
Cheerleaders for capital punishment claim victims’ families find peace after executions. But I don’t want whoever killed Carol, a sister to me for 27 years, to be executed. I wouldn’t wish on anyone what she suffered—looking helplessly into the face of her killer.
Lawyers won’t let us say any of that publicly. By the time we’re free to speak, we’ll probably be too tired and traumatized. This is capital punishment’s brutal irony; defendants’ families are terrified into a silence that helps perpetuate the broken, abusive system.
At countless pretrial hearings, Steve listens attentively, silently, as prosecutors—good-hearted people, surely, with spouses, grandchil-dren they spoil, personal sorrows and heroics—direct their best efforts into executing him. Every legal mechanism seems greased for conviction. When I lament to a prosecutor-turned-criminal-
judge friend that I believed even prosecutors would care about truth, she smiles ruefully. “Prosecutors just want to win.”
I awaken nightly, sick with fear, and imagine the bailiff announcing, “Guilty.” Would I drop? Curse the jury? Friends say, “There are always appeals,” confi-dent the system eventually spits out the innocent. They don’t understand that if Steve were sentenced to die, the best he could hope for would be transfer to regular prison or, far less likely, freedom, only after years of exhausting legal battle—and death row’s solitary confinement.
He can bear jail, he says, because of our support and a two-inch window through which he watches sunrise. It’s his time of quiet solace, the pouring of light, the imagined sounds of the desert’s arousal. When it rains, he strains for any scent of sage released by water touching parched leaves.
My mother, meanwhile, has a recurring vision:
Steve walks down the corridor, officers on either side, toward a room with a gurney, restraints, tubing, and needles. (A former nurse, Mom knows medical paraphernalia. How it sounds, how it smells.)
I imagine the clock: Eleven fifty-three . . . fifty-four. . .
She works at being able to go down the hall with him, mentally, like an angel sharing his most desperate hour.
Eleven fifty-five. Five minutes until my son is killed.
If this scene unfolds in, say, 15 years, it’s unlikely she’ll still be alive. If she is, will it stop her 98-year-old heart?
Eleven fifty-six . . . seven . . . No. I can't do this.
She still hasn’t made it to midnight. Perhaps some kind of divine mercy pre-vents her. Or hard-wiring; a mother isn’t meant to envision her child’s traumat-ic death.
Or maybe, deep down, she knows that if Steve lands in that shooting gallery, she won’t be there watching. I will. And if it comes to that, I can only pray that both of their hearts give out before the onslaught of unbearable pain.
Mary DeMocker wrote this essay in 2010 before the death penalty was dropped in her brother’s case. In Oct. 2013, Steve was convicted on circumstantial evidence. He current-ly pursues appeal from the solitary confinement block of a for-profit maximum-security prison. Mary teaches harp and lives with her family in Oregon. For more of her writing and music, visit www.marydemocker.com.
How to Stop a Heart
5 3rd Street Suite 725 San Francisco / CA / 94103 415 / 243 / 0143 (p) 415 / 766 / 4593 (f) www.deathpenalty.org www.facebook.com/deathpenaltyfocus Twitter @DPFocus
Steve DeMocker, the brother of author Mary DeMocker, enjoying the outdoors. Steve is now in
prison in Arizona, appealing his case.