Walking in the valley of death

By Peter Kimani

Southern trees bear strange fruit Blood on the leaves  Blood at the root

Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

African-American jazz great Billie Holiday croons smoothly, as if to mock the violent history that has defined America’s South, once a bastion of slavery, and still grappling with its complex legacy.

Bodies – many of them disproportionately black – may not be swinging from poplar trees in the lynching that marked the days Holiday is singing about.

They now die, some of them utterly innocent, at the hands of the State. Hardly a week passes in the US without a plea for justice from a death row inmate about to be killed for a crime most insist they did not commit. Those fears are validated by the growing number of convicts routinely walking to freedom after pioneering technology reaffirms their innocence, more often than not, after years in prison.

DNA evidence

Such was the relief this month for Michael Morton, a Texas man who was set free after 25 years in jail for a murder he did not commit.

"I thank God this wasn’t a capital case," he said after his release, after DNA evidence linked his wife’s killing to another man, already convicted for other crimes.

Morton was lucky to have been jailed for life, rather than sentenced to death, which would have sealed his fate years ago.

As Morton walked out of the Texas jail, Obie Anthony was leaving a Los-Angeles jail where he spent 17 years for a murder that had been proven he did not commit.

Another American convict, Hank Skinner, who came within 35 minutes of lethal injection last year – won a reprieve this month to allow DNA testing over 1995 triple murders he insists he did not commit.

It is cases such as these, and the ground-breaking technology that wasn’t available a decade or two ago, that make a strong case against death penalty.

Two years ago, President Kibaki commuted 4,000 death row inmates to life imprisonment, relieving the world of a sizeable chunk of more than 20,000 such inmates worldwide. That decision came into sharp focus recently when Justice Mohammed Warsame sentenced former policeman Dickson Munene and businessman Alex Chepkonga to hang for the murder of Dr James Kariuki, son of former Gatundu North MP Patrick Kariuki Muiruri.

"The President should sign death warrants passed by the court as failure to do so is to fail in his constitutional duty," the judge said after making his ruling last month.

But in the US, the debate surrounds inmates’ rights to fair trial, especially in cases fraught with discrepancies. The heat of southern oppression, to use the words of Martin Luther King Jnr, appears to scorch many ordinary mortals in this part of the world.

Southern States of Texas and Georgia, for instance, are notorious for killing innocent men. Texas Governor Rick Perry, who is also a Republican presidential hopeful in next year’s elections, recently said he’d "never struggled" to enjoy a goodnight’s sleep over the 235 executions carried out under his watch.

Crime and punishment are complex issues. A human rights lobby that monitors capital offences, Death Penalty Information Centre, says more than 130 people have been released from death row "with evidence of their innocence" since 1973. This confirms some States have shed innocent blood.

This is particularly disturbing given that 35 per cent of those executed in that period were black, who only constitute ten per cent of the national population.

Anguished cry

The anguished cry of Troy Davis, an African-American man from Georgia who was executed in September – in a sea of overwhelming evidence that he was the fall guy – attests to the perils that cloud justice in the US.

Davis was convicted for the 1991 murder of a policeman, and all but two witnesses have recanted their evidence and confirmed they had been coerced by police to implicate him. One of the two men still standing by their evidence is the man now suspected to be the actual gunman in new evidence.

But does death penalty serve as crime deterrent? The US investigative agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI’s) Uniform Crime Report 2010 showed the South, which had 80 per cent of executions in the nation, also had the highest murder rate. States with least executions have lower crime levels. Sixteen of America’s 50 states have scrapped death penalty from their statues.

While these figures may say something about capital punishment and its deficiencies in crime prevention, they say nothing of the individuals whose lives are caught in the vortex of bureaucracy that, all too often, is motivated by racial prejudice, and the scars they bear for life – should they escape their death sentences.

It can be even more traumatising waiting in the death row for years, waiting for sure death for a crime one knows they did not commit.

"A core value in the social work profession is the respect and belief in the inherent dignity and worth of each person; as such, the death penalty conflicts with this basic social work value," says Ira Colby, Dean of the Graduate College of Social Work at the University of Houston, where some exonerated prisoners were invited to speak recently.

　

"The controversy surrounding the recent execution of Troy Davis in Georgia is but one example of the necessity for open, honest discussion around the death penalty and its place in a civil society," he adds.

The Standard On Saturday spoke to some of the 138 innocent men snatched from the jaws of death, after years in death row, and brings you their stories that are at once rhapsodic and heartbreaking.