Massachusetts Offers Plan for Death Penalty
|
|
A commission appointed by Gov. Mitt Romney has come up with what it considers the first virtually foolproof formula for carrying out the death penalty, and Mr. Romney is expected to use the plan to try to bring back capital punishment to the state, where it was abolished two decades ago. One of the major recommendations is raising the bar for a death penalty sentence from the normal legal standard of guilt ”beyond a reasonable doubt” to a finding of ”no doubt about the defendant’s guilt.” The commission has also proposed that a defendant in a capital case be given the option of facing two separate juries: one for trial and, if convicted, a second for sentencing. A co-chairman of the commission, Joseph L. Hoffmann, a law professor at Indiana University, said the idea was to avoid the contradiction that can arise when a defendant contests his guilt in the first phase of the trial, but in the sentencing phase, in order to get the lightest sentence possible, admits guilt and claims to be remorseful. The commission’s 10 recommendations are intended to counter increasing skepticism about the death penalty. ”Taken as a whole, these 10 proposals would create a death penalty system for Massachusetts unlike any such system that has ever existed, or even seriously been considered before,” the commission said in its report, which is scheduled to be released on Monday. A spokeswoman for Mr. Romney, a Republican, said he would not comment on the report until it was released. Last September, when Mr. Romney appointed the commission, he said in an interview that he was ”looking for a standard of certainty” to ”assure us that only the guilty will suffer the death penalty.” The proposals, which the commission warned would be expensive, include several ideas that experts say are unprecedented, and others that have been tried but not so comprehensively. The plan is sure to be controversial, and even death penalty supporters said they had concerns about the viability of some of the ideas. On the other hand, even some death penalty opponents acknowledged that the plan would reduce the possibility of wrongful death sentences and racial disparities in sentencing. The cornerstones of the commission’s recommendations are that the death penalty be applied only to a narrow list of cases and that each case include scientific evidence, like DNA, fingerprints or footprints. The death penalty would be sought only in the ”worst of the worst” murders, the report said: torture murders, political terrorism murders, murders of police officers or others in the criminal justice system, and murders of multiple victims. The physical evidence required would have to ‘’strongly corroborate the defendant’s guilt,” connecting the defendant either to ”the crime scene, the murder weapon or the victim’s body.” An independent board would review the scientific evidence. In addition, the judge would be required to give the jury special warnings that nonscientific evidence, like testimony and witness identification, can be unreliable. The commission also recommended that courts get broad authority to set aside wrongful death sentences, that the state attorney general review every decision by a district attorney to bring a capital case and that a separate review board investigate claims of errors in death penalty cases. ”There’s no system that’s remotely like this anywhere else,” said Professor Hoffmann, who led the 11-member commission, which included prosecutors, police officials, forensic scientists and a retired judge. ”The death penalty ought to be reserved for only the most clear-cut, sure-thing cases.” One expert, Jamie Orenstein, a former Justice Department official who worked on the death penalty prosecution of Timothy J. McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing, said the recommendations were indeed innovative, but ran the risk of making the criteria so narrow that ”no one is going to be executed under this law.” ”They really seem to be making an effort to have a less bad death penalty, but in doing that they just show how that’s an impossible thing,” Mr. Orenstein said. ”With all the restrictions you need, you wind up distorting your system.” |