"I was released from Death Row. Under the Fair Justice Act, I'd be dead."

[pnwmom]

http://www.al.com/opinion/index.ssf/2017/04/i_was_released_from_death_row.html

By Anthony Ray Hinton, Alabama death row survivor and a community educator with the Equal Justice Initiative

I spent 30 years on Alabama's death row for a crime I did not commit. If proposed changes to Alabama's postconviction procedures under consideration by the state legislature had been enacted, I would have been executed despite my innocence.

I was wrongly convicted of two murders that took place in Jefferson County in
1985. Contrary to an inaccurate op-ed published by the Attorney General this
week, there were no eyewitnesses to these crimes. I was convicted solely on the State's assertion that a gun in my mother's home was the weapon used to commit these two murders. Because my appointed lawyer failed to get adequate expert assistance to prove that the prosecutor's claims about this weapon were false, I was convicted and sentenced to death.

Death row prisoners face enormous challenges in finding lawyers who will assist
them. State law in Alabama limits compensation to lawyers to $1500 for this kind of representation and lawyers are unwilling to take on complex cases that will last years for that kind of pay. For 14 years, I could not find volunteer lawyers capable of providing the legal assistance I needed to prove my innocence.

Because the so called "Fair Justice Act" now pending before the state legislature puts time restrictions on how long death row prisoners have to prove their innocence or a wrongful conviction, this legislation increases the risk of executing innocent people and makes our system even less fair.

SNIP

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

1. It's not a bug, it's a feature

A former attorney general of Virginia came right out and said he was against DNA testing because it would undermine the state.

[Eliot Rosewater]

2. America has used wrongful convictions and wrongful executions as a way to

make sure the black folks cant compete fairly with the white folks for a very long time.


Now the same white folks are going to stop immigration because they fear they cant compete with these other brown folks.

They are right, they would get their asses handed to them.