Innocent & Executed
New NCADP report reveals four examples of innocent men executed in Texas, Missouri
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For years, abolitionists have worked with the knowledge that many people ? at least 123, at last count ? have been sentenced to death, only to be exonerated later after evidence of their innocence emerged. And abolitionists long have suspected that in addition to these exonerations, other innocent people actually have been put to death.
A new NCADP report, Innocent and Executed: Four Chapters in the Life of America?s Death Penalty, details the cases of four men in Texas and Missouri who were demonstrably if not certainly innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted, sentenced to death and executed.
The cases first came to light because of a handful of investigations spearheaded by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., with a group of cooperating attorneys, the Innocence Project, the Justice Project and students at Columbia University, the University of Michigan and several other law schools. Results of these investigations were picked up by leading newspapers as well as by ABC?s Nightline.
As a result, articles appearing in the Chicago Tribune, Houston Chronicle, St. Louis Post-Dispatch and airing on network television raised questions about the executions of Ruben Cantu, Carlos De Luna and Cameron Todd Cunningham, executed by the state of Texas; and Larry Griffin, executed by the state of Missouri.
?If the execution of one innocent person is one execution too many, then what have we discovered about our criminal justice system when we learn of four such cases?? asks Diann Rust-Tierney, NCADP executive director. ?How many more cases are there where evidence of innocence has been lost or destroyed? How can we trust a system that we always knew sent the innocent to death row ? and that now we know has executed them as well??
Rust-Tierney credited the work of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, Inc., for helping these cases come to light. Ted Shaw, the fund?s president and director-counsel, said the revelations should mark a new dawn for debate and discussion around the death penalty. ?It?s too late to save those men ? or the victims of other erroneous executions that have not yet come to light,? Shaw said. ?But it?s time to recognize that, regardless of our views on the death penalty, any future debates must proceed with the knowledge that we have put innocent people to death.?
Accompanying the new NCADP report is an Innocent and Executed Organizing Toolkit: A Resource for NCADP Affiliates and Allies. This toolkit includes materials local activists need to plan and produce their own public education events. Included are event planning guidelines, sample publicity fliers and sign-in sheets, fact sheets and other information about innocence, a sample letter to the editor and op-ed piece.
?Busy activists now have a ?toolkit in a box? to help educate the public about the issue of innocence and the death penalty,? Rust-Tierney said. ?The risk of executing an innocent person is of utmost importance in terms of what drives the public to reconsider the death penalty system. When policy-makers are confronted with this risk, we believe they ultimately will choose alternatives to the death penalty.? To go straight to the report, click here.
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