Actual Innocence

In death penalty cases, once a defendant is convicted and has exhausted his initial round of appeals of his sentence the options for seeking appellate relief become extremely limited and even more extremely convoluted thanks to the complex intertwining of the federal habeas corpus process with state post-conviction remedies through the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). Generally speaking, convicted defendants may only challenge claimed errors in federal court in habeas corpus proceedings if they previously exhausted those claims in state post-conviction proceedings. This means that if their appellate lawyer doesn't do a particularly thorough job of raising all possible grounds for appeal in the first go-round in state court, those claims are generally considered procedurally defaulted for federal habeas purposes even if they would have been meritorious had they been brought correctly.

But one of the exceptions to a procedural default is the extremely difficult to prove "actual innocence" claim. Basically, even if he has defaulted or exhausted all other methods of appeal, a prisoner can still be granted relief if he can meet the exceedingly high burden of showing evidence that he is actually innocent of the crime, and that new evidence not considered at his original trial would likely have changed the verdict entered by the jury. It's a standard precious few defendants utilize with success. That is, if they can even get the court to take their case and examine the evidence they claim exonerates them.

Next month unless a court intervenes, Georgia is set to execute a man who on appeal is claiming actual innocence because most of the witnesses against him have recanted their stories and claimed that they did not see the defendant do the shooting. The defense also claims they have other evidence of the defendant's actual innocence. But so far, they have been unsuccessful in getting any court to grant review to consider all of this new evidence that allegedly demonstrates his innocence.

It truly amazes me that we are willing to execute people without satisfying ourselves completely that there is no reason to doubt the validity and accuracy of the jury's conviction. If there is new evidence that the witnesses lied and the jury may have relied on their testimony in deciding to convict, what is the harm in delaying the execution in order to allow for full proceedings on such claimed errors? Something about the way that DAs and Attorneys General seem to rush through the appeals process, urging at each step that the appeals be rejected, is just terribly unseemly. If you really and truly believe that the person is a murderer who was constitutionally and accurately convicted, you shouldn't be afraid to have all aspects of that trial and conviction examined. And if the complaint is that it takes too long and costs too much money for all of these appeals, then perhaps you shouldn't be trying to execute them to begin with.