Bills aim to reform Tennessee's death penalty



By Kate Howard
THE TENNESSEAN

Tennessee's death penalty needs major reform to ensure that people 
facing execution get fair trials, said members of a legislative study 
committee which just ended 16 months of analyzing how capital crimes 
are prosecuted in this state.

The study committee, which included people for and against the death 
penalty, was asked to look for ways to make capital punishment more 
fairly and accurately applied across the state.

Four bills related to the recommendations have been introduced and 
are sponsored by the committee's chairmen, Sen. Doug Jackson, D-
Dickson, and Rep. Kent Coleman, D-Murfreesboro.

The committee wants the state legislature to:

• Require defense attorneys in capital cases to be highly qualified;

• Mandate that defense attorneys have uniform access to evidence 
against their clients;

• Require police officers to record all interrogations related to a 
homicide case;

• Force the state to set realistic timetables for litigating capital 
cases so families are not revictimized by decades of appeals.

"This is not about trying to get a guilty defendant off," Jackson 
said. "This is about creating a process that is as fair as possible 
and as accurate as possible. It's about convicting the guilty, 
exonerating the innocent and having a trial as perfect as it can 
possibly be."

Jackson, a co-chairman of the committee, is in favor of the death 
penalty. He lost a first cousin to a brutal murder, he said, and he 
believes her killer belongs on death row, where he is sitting. But 
Jackson says there are many reasons to reform the system that sends 
offenders to the death chamber, and he believes the costliest 
recommendation, the $8 million creation of an independent authority 
to oversee defense of those facing death row, is most important.

Though similar committees in some states like Maryland and New Jersey 
have recommended their states abolish the death penalty, Tennessee's 
committee looked only at how to make the system more fair and accurate.

The state executed Steve Henley on Feb. 4 by injection, the first 
execution by that method since U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger 
ruled in September 2007 that the three-drug lethal injection process 
was cruel and unusual. Trauger barred the state from using that 
method, but the state is appealing that ruling. (For coverage of 
Steve Henley's execution, http://www.tennessean.com/article/20090205/
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decoration:underline;">click here.

Charles Strobel, an advocate for the homeless who represented Murder 
Victims' Families for Human Rights on the committee, said it's a 
major concern that virtually all death row inmates are indigent.

"The state of Tennessee has no margin for error," Strobel said. 
"Death is a different sentence. We must be 100 percent fair and 
accurate."

He called upon elected officials to declare a moratorium on the death 
penalty, saying there are too many unresolved issues.

Second study sought

The committee also passed a resolution asking the state to commission 
another, more extensive study of the issues they didn't tackle, among 
them the record keeping related to capital cases, whether mentally 
ill defendants should face the death penalty and how to better serve 
the families of murder victims.

"I think my biggest surprise, though I had an idea, is that the death 
penalty is a very expensive process," said Rep. Bill Dunn, R–
Knoxville. "It has to be in order to get the right verdict, but I 
don't think the average taxpayer knows what it costs to seek this 
penalty."

Neither does the state, according to the report. The comptroller's 
office testified that no effective way exists to track the costs of 
capital punishment cases to the state.

Dunn hopes the bills recommended by the committee will be passed by 
the full General Assembly this year.

"Obviously, in politics, you never know what people will do to score 
points and make a point," Dunn said. "We hope they'll look at the 
time and effort we put in, and I think most people will agree we will 
have a better system if we pass this legislation."

Two members of the committee voted against the final draft of the 
report on Thursday, citing opposition to the costly recommendation of 
creating an independent authority to oversee the representation of 
suspects facing the death penalty, starting with their trials.

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