US court halts death penalty constitutionality case

District Judge Kevin Fine 

WASHINGTON — The highest criminal court in Texas intervened Wednesday to halt a rare case challenging the constitutionality of the death penalty.

Texas District Judge Kevin Fine opened the case on December 6 with a series of hearings to determine whether the death penalty as applied in Texas risks executing innocent people.

Fine himself is a rarity, a heavily tattooed Democrat elected to his job in the politically conservative state.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals suspended hearings on December 7 on the case, and announced Wednesday that by a 6-2 vote it would not let the case proceed.

Judge Fine raised the issue in the case of John Green, 25. The prosecutor in the case has vowed to seek the death penalty for Green's involvement in a 2008 robbery.

However, Green's case has not been tried yet, so the appeals court ruled that the case was inadmissible.

"Mr. Green asserts that he is innocent, but apparently assumes that, if he goes to trial, he would be both wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death," read the ruling.

"These assumptions are simply not warranted before a jury has considered the evidence in the present case and rendered a verdict," the court said.

Green claimed that no jury can decide whether he is guilty of a crime that could result in a death penalty "because it is possible that an innocent person, perhaps in Texas, perhaps in some other jurisdiction, has been wrongly executed and therefore Mr. Green is subject to the possibility of being wrongfully convicted and wrongfully executed."

The Supreme Court "has never required human infallibility in its criminal laws or procedures," the court's ruling said.

It added that Green's challenge "can only be made when and if he has been convicted and sentenced to death. And it can be made only upon a showing that the Texas sentencing scheme has operated in an unconstitutional manner to deprive him of a constitutionally fair trial."

Issues surrounding the constitutionality of the death penalty in Texas "are indeed weighty public policy issues, greatly deserving of considerable debate," adding that the Texas Legislature "is an appropriate forum in which to debate these public policy issues."

Attorneys for Green said they were "deeply disappointed" that the appeals court shut down the hearing.

The appeals court "failed to assume the responsibility that Texas courts also have to address the underlying issue: whether the Texas death penalty trial process creates an unacceptable risk that innocent people have, and will continue to be, wrongfully convicted and executed," they said in a statement.

Both the Texas courts and the state legislature "have the obligation to address this overriding concern," they said.

The decision "does nothing to dispel the cloud of unreliability and indifference that hangs over the Texas capital punishment system," they said.

Two men sentenced to death whose guilt was challenged by the experts were executed in Texas in 2000 and 2004.

Claude Jones was convicted on the basis of a strand of hair found at the scene of the crime that later DNA tests determined was not his, and Todd Willingham was sentenced to death for setting fire to his home and killing his three daughters. Experts later showed that the fire was accidental.

Source: AFP, January 13, 2011