Fitzsimon File

The General Assembly is close to passing legislation that would make it less likely that the state’s criminal justice system sends an innocent person to prison. It’s an important part of restoring public faith in that system, but only a first step.

Both the House and Senate have passed legislation to set up the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission, an eight-member panel that will review inmates’ claims of innocence. If the Commission believes the claims have merit, they will forward the case to a three-judge panel to make the final determination.  

It is likely that negotiators will meet soon to work out differences in the two bills. The Commission is the brainchild of I. Beverly Lake, Jr., former Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, who created a study group of lawyers, prosecutors, and law enforcement officers after a series of high-profile cases in which innocent people were convicted of crimes and spent years behind bars.

Rep. Rick Glazier shepherded the bill through the legislative process and knows all too well why it’s needed. Glazier represented Lesley Jean, a man sent to prison for a rape that DNA testing proved he did not commit.

There are still important issues left to hammer out, like how to make sure confessions from inmates with mental illness don’t preclude later consideration of innocence by the commission and how open the proceedings of the Commission will be to the public.

The all but certain passage of the legislation is important and begins to address the obvious problems in the criminal justice system. But the Commission won’t be a safeguard for everything, even all innocence cases.

Daryl Hunt spent 18 years in prison for a rape and murder he did not commit. Hunt was exonerated after several rounds of DNA testing and was pardoned by Governor Mike Easley. Hunt may well still be in prison today if not for DNA evidence, even if the N.C Innocence Inquiry Commission existed.  And most murder cases do not involve DNA evidence.

That’s why the Commission must simply be a first step, an admission that the system has flaws that need to be addressed comprehensively.  Nowhere is that more important than in the state’s capital punishment system, where 170 death row inmates await execution, most of them tried and convicted in the same flawed system that wrongly convicted Darryl Hunt and Alan Gell and many others.

One of those inmates, Samuel Russell Flippen, is scheduled to be executed August 18^th in Central Prison. 

The last several years have brought public scrutiny to cases in which prosecutors hid or withheld evidence, where race played a role in a death sentence, and where defendants in capital trials were represented by appointed lawyers who were drunk or incompetent or worse. 

If it works the way its intended, the new Commission will catch some of the cases in which innocent people are wrongly convicted. But what about the cases where defendants receive unfair trials because of poor lawyers, misconduct by prosecutors, or the presence of race as a factor in sentencing?

Senator Hugh Webster voted against the Innocence Commission in the Senate, saying that he’d rather fix what’s wrong with the system than set up a new procedure for preventing mistakes.

The truth is, the state needs both, a well-organized Innocence Commission and a fresh look at the flaws in the criminal justice system, particularly the administration of capital punishment.

Lawmakers ought to give final approval to the Commission, then temporarily suspend executions until all the flaws can be addressed in the system that determines who lives and who dies.  Good for former Chief Justice Lake and Rep. Glazier. Now let’s take the next step.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 12th, 2006 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Fitzsimon File. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.