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.