Why do death row inmates get so many appeals?
 

I have a question for any of you legal buffs.

I was reading this article and wondering why someone convicted, sentenced and on death row gets so many years of appeals? It must cost taxpayers millions to do so. Why not one appeal and killer the cowardly fucker?

√ Condemned Boston Marathon bomber may spend years in prison during appeal

Or this shit-stain...?

Another serial killer awaits death row

Mitch

They typically get three appeals. Lawyers are good at causing delay after delay, and the courts typically have a huge backlog of cases to go through.

Unless you have the loot to appeal,you'll eventually meet the maker

3 appeals? Why? Most of these assholes probably have public defenders anyway, right?

Because bleeding-heart liberals.

Think about it. They were sentenced to death. That's some pretty absolute shit. I agree that they should at least get a couple of appeals. It's not like it's exactly unheard of that innocent people get convicted in this country. :2 cents:

Yeah but not many get sentenced to death and I'm sure these days with the use if video, dna etc., it's not too often they get it wrong. Is there any doubtthat Tsarnaev did it?mfry him and let the families move on.

and thats where you are wrong this country has executed way too many people who were later proven innocent...and it still happens.

the great thing for tsarneav is I doubt he will survive prison long enough to see his first appeal...

I wonder how many appeals the victim(s) of the inmate got from the inmate? That should also be the number of appeals the inmate gets, too. Just my :2 cents:

There are several reasons.

1. One of the reasons it takes years is because the court is heavily backlogged. You might file an appeal and it could take months or even years before it gets in front of a judge.

2. Prosecution (and defense) will often purposely hide evidence that could hurt their case. It isn't that they break the law, they simply choose not to include it. When the defense hears about potential evidence that could help their client they appeal. The prosecution fights and it could be a while while we go back and forth and the court decides if they are going to allow that evidence in which could mean an new trial.

3. Mental health. There are certain laws in place that are meant as a safety buffer that hopefully make certain that we don't execute someone innocent or mentally handicapped. Even if the person who is found guilty pleads guilty and admits to the crime the system will go through these steps just to be certain. If the person fights the execution then we could go through these steps and others.

4. Defense lawyers are smart. If the defense has a few different ideas they will not present them at once. They put one up on appeal. If it fails then they put the next up on appeal and so on. This can carry the case on for a long time.

In the end all of these are allowed because we hope that we are taking steps to make certain we are not executing innocent people. Of course, all of this takes time and money.

The death penalty in general doesn't work. It doesn't deter people from committing those types of crimes and it does not good for society as a whole. All it does is cost tax payers money and clog up the court system.

costs a lot to execute someone.. probably a way to 'spread out' the execution costs. the pricetag for an execution is a big reason there is so many waiting

I think it is a time to think about death for the inmate.. Straighten up, act good hope for deley..

yes. the trial lawyer industrial complex generates millions in revenue for defense lawyers. anti-death penalty is big business. just like the race card, the sex card, any insult or injury is a big moneymaker for the left wing. look at al sharptons daughter.

:upsidedow

Just saw this while searching quick. It costs NOTHING to execute someone. Hell, they could easily do it for less with a bullet or two.

$7.4 billion: 2006-07 budget for the California Corrections Department.
$250 million: Average cost of 11 executions in 27 years.
$114 million: Costs of death penalty to taxpayers (annual).
$34,150: Average annual cost of housing an inmate in state prison.
9,000: Average number of pages of court transcripts in capital cases.
645: Inmates on death row.
$200: Cost of lethal injection chemicals.
49: Average age at time of execution.
33: Death Row inmates who died of natural causes.
17.5: Average time spent on Death Row.
13: Inmates executed in California since 1978.

You would appeal until you turned blue if you were on death row as well. I know I would. Even this boston bomber guy, guilty as shit but there is always the chance that sometime during the next 10-15 years of appeals the death penalty will be abolished in the US or that particular state.

its the legal system. some wave that and put to death within a year. i think timothy mcveigh waved his rights

Its the way our courts are set up, any court decision can be appealed, its what separates us from China or Iran. Amazing the amount of people who do not understand this.

a lot of inmates ask for continuances as well

22 million per execution? i heard in the millions, but not that much

We do appeals because sometimes we convict the wrong person.

:2 cents:

Tom Brady should be put to death for deflating balls.

This is a great answer....

Another thing is during the trial they have a crappy public defender, but after the trial legal groups get involved. These groups are large, well funded, and do not believe in the death penalty. There are also other groups that work to get innocent people on death row released.

I also do not believe in the death penalty. I used to - "kill someone and we will kill you back". However, it's not a deterrent.... No one says "I had better not use a gun during this robbery because if I end up shooting someone and killing them I might be put on death row". That doesn't happen - criminals already know the risks before they commit the crime, and what makes a criminal a criminal is that they are willing to accept that risk.

I also think it's an easy way out. I would much rather have them sit in prison for the next sixty years of their life worried about getting fucked in the ass in the shower.

Because death is an absolute and as mentioned above, there have been wrongful executions.

Why does this guy get the same amount of appeals as anyone else...because we're all supposed to get equal rights under the laws. If we start making exceptions, it's a slippery slope.

Many many many years ago I wrote an editorial in the old N*etpond Chronicles about the Timothy McVeigh trial and the missing evidence. I still hold true that even the scummiest of the scumbags deserve a fair trial. Because if the biggest scumbag in the world gets a fair trial and fair treatment under the laws, then in theory, it should bode well for anyone else. I remember receiving email threats after I wrote that piece...was interesting to say the least.

I'm not denying that this sick prick needs to be executed, but he has the same rights as anyone else in procedure. Sometimes, we have the bear with shit like this because it's better this guy lives a bit longer through appeals than an innocent man get executed because of overzealous prosecutions and for the sake of public opinion down the road because we made an exception once and now have to do it again.

For real, many of those guys probably haven't even seen a court room. American justice is "stamping justice"; stamp-> next-> stamp-> next.. 90 % of all cases are done like this. Though maybe not 90 % of death penalty cases, but who knows.

Yell I don't know that much about it so I probably am wrong but what I do know is that 10-30 years for appeals is ridiculous.

Death cases have plenty of time in court, but you are correct in that most cases don. There is a great documentary called Gideon's Army which is about three public defenders in Georgia. They are all grossly overworked and underpaid. Their boss at one point describes the system as no longer being about finding justice, it is about getting convictions and it is now designed to get as many people to plead guilty as possible in order to pad numbers, save time and save money.

The only real way to fix it would be to expand the size of the justice system (or modify how it runs) so when an appeal is made it gets in front of a judge quickly and doesn't sit on the docket for months and months. Or limit the number of appeals and shorten the system which could increase the risk of executing an innocent person.

Personally, I think the way it should be done is that DNA evidence (as well as all evidence in general) is entered in every case no matter what. Neither side gets a say. This can speed thing up greatly since you won't have one side trying to suppress evidence and the other trying to enter it. Fights over DNA testing and allowing the results in court can drag on for years.

I would have agreed, but with the umber of case that have been overturned with DNA evidence, Id say its prob not the worst thing in the world.

hundreds of dethrone inmates have been exonerated so the system DOES fuck it up a fair amount of the time

Because the Death Penalty is final and it has been misused literally hundreds of times to kill innocent people. As someone associated with the adult industry, you are no doubt familiar with the concept of selective enforcement. When the State selectively enforces laws that cause a person to die, there is a glaring interest in holding the State to the highest degree of accountability as part of the process to prove its claims.

Here is a list of 153 death row inmates who have been exonerated and released:
Innocence: List of Those Freed From Death Row | Death Penalty Information Center


Since the inception of DNA evidence, more than 329 people have been completely exonerated by evidence that could not have been examined during their trials. Home ? The Innocence Project

The government should not be haphazardly killing people under the false claim that it is serving the public good. More importantly, when someone you know is falsely accused and sentenced, having adequate access to the appeals process becomes much more important than the cost of the appeals.

The best solution is to do away with the death penalty entirely. It serves zero actual purpose. It has never been a deterrent and it allows for zero progress to be completed because the perpetrator is six feet under. Instead, convicted criminals should be studied by law enforcement for the purpose of solving crimes better or preventing other crimes, by society to determine causal links between personality and crime that might be addressed, and the criminals should be required to do a humane amount of work to offset the cost of their incarceration. Put simply, they are worth much more to us alive than dead anyway.

A few years ago, I was attending a continuing legal education seminar at Northwestern Law School here in Chicago - and we had a presentation by Governor Ryan about the death penalty. During his remarks, he announced that he would be commuting all of the death sentences in Illinois later in the day. He explained himself. He said that by training and early experience, he was a pharmacist and that he tended to use a pharmacist's perspective in broader application. He noted that medicines that are not safe or effective need to be pulled from the shelves - and he said that, based on the many cases he'd seen as Governor of Illinois, that the system of capital punishment simply was not reliable. It was broken and ineffective. He pointed to seven instances of innocent men who had been scheduled for execution before their innocence was finally proven. In one of those cases, involving Rolando Cruiz, he'd been convicted three times before three separate juries of the sexual assault and murder of a little girl home sick from school. The case was sent back for a retrial by appellate courts twice because it felt that he'd been denied a fair trial. That's thirty-six men and women, each sworn upon their oaths not to convict anyone unless they were convinced beyond a reasonable guilt. They not only had to believe he was guilty, but they swore to convict only if there was no doubt about it. They were all wrong. Not only was there doubt, in fact he was not the perpetrator at all. Rolando Cruiz was never there, had never met the girl, and was guilty of nothing. The other six cases had facts just as compelling. Since Illinois finally got around to abolishing capital punishment by statute a few years ago, a whole raft of wrongful convictions have emerged, some after men have spent as much as thirty years in prison for rapes they never committed and for murders when they were never at the crime scene. Some of their convictions came from torture used in extracting false confessions. Other times, law enforcement just hid evidence inconsistent with their theories of guilt. There was substantial gamesmanship by the prosecutors in Lake County and a series of convictions were recently reversed. It is an ugly, human, imperfect system by which we try defendants, and it is prone to make serious mistakes, as it reliably does, like every other invention of men. Yes, as suggested above, sometimes the attorney is incompetent, though this is probably not as frequent as defendants claim. No, attorneys cannot hide evidence and then release it later for an appeal; appeals courts do not ordinarily hear any evidence at all. In fact, hiding evidence is the kind of thing that deserves disbarment and actually gets that punishment.

Why are there a succession of appeals and post-conviction procedures? In some cases, they guy on death row didn't get a fair trial and the appeals courts have had to repeatedly send the case back so he gets his due - only to have the trial courts screw up again, as they did with Rolando Cruiz. Sometimes it's because his prior lawyers were not competent. Sometimes, there is newly discovered evidence - this is never a sure thing, because, believe it or not, that does not always entitle someone to a new trial. There are new developments in science - read DNA tests - that were unavailable at the time of trial and which can emerge to prove actual innocence Sometimes, the higher judges change the law and fairness requires that before someone is executed, he have the benefit of the changed law. Sometimes, it takes decades for a witness to come forward who was actually present and sometimes they are deathbed confessions by the actual criminal. Sometimes, it takes decades for witnesses to come forward and tell the story of how they were forced or intimidated into their testimony for the prosecution. Sometimes the courts give rulings that resemble the issues in a particular death penalty case and it becomes important to litigate about whether it makes a difference germaine to the conviction of another. No one accepts any of these things without confirmatory evidence. Defending these death row people is a thankless, painful, and quite difficult job.

Please remember -

1. If accused persons have rights, it is not because they are accused criminals. It is because they are Americans. Though an accused person loses his freedom when he is locked up and denied bail, and likely loses his job and family, and never gets those things back in most cases if the cops were wrong, one thing he doesn't give up are the rights that are assured to all Americans. The rights of defendants are simply the rights of all of us, and it is hard to know whether any of us will require them at some point or another. If you weaken the rights of any accused person, you weaken them for yourself and for the people close to you. When rights are taken away, they rarely come back.

2. There is no constitutional right to "closure". That is the buzzword that the media and people close to a victim choose to use when they are out for the blood and scalp of a defendant. Look, when someone close to you is killed or dies, there never is any closure. You will always miss that person and sometimes forget that they are even dead for a moment. That does not change because someone is executed. And no one has a right to "closure" so important that it is worth the life of another.

3. One would think that in a country dominated by a religious belief founded by a wrongly-convicted and wrongly executed Jesus Christ that there just might be some sensitivity to the subject. But one would be largely wrong.

4. The State does not give us life and it's hard for me to understand any integrity in a belief that it should have the power to take life from anyone. There are those of us who believe that our lives do not even belong to us, ourselves.

5. For a short time in my life amounting to a year, I prosecuted men and women in the name of the United States of America, got convictions and got heavy sentences. Not one of the defendants I prosecuted at trial was acquitted. To one with the right disposition, it is an extremely humbling experience. One quickly learns the frailties of human memory and testimony and just as rapidly absorbs the full impact of one's role in utterly destroying the life of another human being. I tried only men and women who I thought were truly criminals and justice was done. But the truth is that it brought no joy to destroy lives, even when that was the just result. No human institution is perfect. I believe that, if for no other reason than the imperfection of our system, our government has no legitimate right to decide when a life is to be taken. Life is sacred and belongs to the Creator. We do not make it more sacred by vindicating crime with death. In fact, we debase life and grow the power of the state.

6. No one will ever be able to count the number of persons who have been executed in this country on the basis of erroneous convictions. Multiple levels of appeal and review may decrease the number, but it can never eliminate the execution of innocent Americans.

even the death penalty in the USA is a rip off...114million$ cost annual to tax payers yet the lethal injection costs 200$ how the fuck do they come up to 114million?

It is all the cost of the courtroom proceedings to get to the point where they use the lethal injection.

death penalty = emotional reaction

emotional reaction = (mostly) erroneous procedure

that's pretty much all there is to it. SykkBoy, Relentless, and Joe nailed it.

You do realize that nobody can read your post because it is a wall of text right?

We kill people in the US at the appropriate rate of killing. Most people killed are guilty, some are not. Many politicians kill people to make themselves richer and more powerful, it is the society we live.
Our schools teach children that democracy is civilized, that we must go out and vote to protect our society. It is in fact our politicians who silently kill us... as we vote for them, to then kill us.

It's a crazy circle and the only real solution is to stop caring and make a dent whenever possible.

and when I mean "kill us"... i mean they actually hire thugs who threaten their bullshit lives and murder people with knives and then set people on fire. I was not being "satirical" when I mentioned MURDER.

:thumbsup:thumbsup canadian stats show juries are more willing to convict if there is no life & death choice as well

Poor "use" of speech marks. And "when" I mean "poor", I actually mean "poor". I was not being "a smart arse cunt" when I mentioned CASHMONIES.

Jel,

I read those as "air-quotes" :1orglaugh

"lol" :winkwink:

btw original post reminded me of this - well worth a watch even if you aren't a fan:

[QUOTE=NETbilling;20476665Why do death row inmates get so many appeals?[/QUOTE]

Because they are going to be killed


Hope that helps clear that up for you

This must for sure have been posted before - But Mitch, take a peek at how it CAN be done.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01mTKDaKa6Q

Yes, I know it is in a country with a fraction of the population of USA, but think about it for a second, probably 95% of inmates in the US could and should be able to get a second chance. The other 5%, well, there are some that does not deserve ANY more chances.....

PS. To lazy right now to figure out the embed feature of YouTube - click the damn link.
:2 cents:

wow. Mixed thoughts on that, but that's some pretty forward thinking - very interesting mate, thanks for posting it :thumbsup

Good answer...:thumbsup

When you also include the fact that there have been quite a few innocent people who have been executed... and thus that makes the state a murderer... It's time for the death penalty to go away.

I utterly believe in killing to protect myself and others from an imminent threat, but once someone is arrested, the state should have no business beating, torturing, or executing people. Just lock them up forever.... and then, in case you find out years later that they were actually innocent, at least they are still alive and they can be freed.





:2 cents:



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Another great post from Joe, as usual.







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Prison is supposed to be about rehabilitation, though obviously that went out the window years ago (if ever here). Executing someone obviously leaves no option for rehabilitation

Not just the executions that have ruined lives. Just some of the convictions.

Death is a release from suffering. Dumb people support the death penalty.

:2 cents:

OK, no death penalty -- sentence him under the Code of Hammurabi.

He was responsible for quite a few deaths and quite a few limbs lost ... Would you really want him released as rehabilitated from prison in 30 years back into the society he cared nothing for committing an act of unspeakable premeditated terrorism?

I don't think anyone is suggesting he should some day be available for parole. He should get life without the possibility of parole.

Some would say death is also the only 100% absolute guarantee that that person will never kill again. :2 cents:

And in my experience the tactic of hurling preemptive insults at those who disagree with you has won exactly 0 debates, I don't see it being any more effective here.