Breaking Rank by Norm Stamper

eliminate street prostitution. But fewer kids would show up for show-and-tell with semen-filled rubbers. And far fewer of America’s sisters and daughters would be beaten, abducted, murdered.
    * I was one of those foot-dragging deputy chiefs, assigned at the time to Field Ops. My argument? Officer safety. We were severely understaffed in patrol, being “nickled and dimed” by Investigations: If four detectives went off to some nebulous task force, I’d have to give up four patrol cops to replace them. I regret my initial opposition to the DA’s proposal. In fact, I’m ashamed of it.

CHAPTER 4
    CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: THE COWARD’S WAY OUT
    O FFICER K IMBERLY T ONAHILL, THE bottom third of her heart sheared off by a .9mm slug, is dead before she hits the ground. Officer Timothy Ruopp, shot in the legs and in the head, lies mortally wounded in Mercy Hospital. Patrol officers swarm the eucalyptus grove next to the parking lot of Grape Street Park. Police canines sniff their way through the damp brush. A black-and-white SDPD chopper hovers overhead, its blazing light helping in the search for the shooter.
    Joselito Cinco, wanted for unlawful possession of a firearm, had bragged to friends, “I’m going to kill the next cop who stops me.” That next cop was Ruopp, an ordained minister with four young children, a shy smile, and a slight lisp. He had stopped Cinco to write him a ticket (for furnishing alcohol to a couple of teenage girls) when the suspect pulled a semiautomatic pistol and opened fire. The cops never had a chance. Both officers’ guns were still holstered when their backup arrived.
    I ride with the police chief to Tonahill’s mother’s house to tell the woman she no longer has a daughter. Kim and Tim had worked for me; I was their deputy chief. I’m sick to my stomach, seething with anger, hoping our cops find Cinco soon. And praying he’ll give them a reason to blow him away.
    But, if he’s caught, tried, convicted? What then? Should the state kill him?
    No.
    When I read of yet another execution, most often these days in Texas, when I picture the actual occurrence—the frying, gassing, hanging, shooting, or lethal injection of a human being—my soul hurts for days. It’s an emotional thing with me, but my opposition to capital punishment is multilayered.
    Race and class discrimination are all too real in every phase of the criminal justice system, from arrest to sentencing. Impoverished black defendants are far more likely to wind up on death row than rich or middle-class whites. Of the 3,700 inmates now awaiting execution nationwide, 43 percent are African-American. Black defendants are not accorded the same due process rights as whites, their cases are not given the same scrutiny and consideration afforded white defendants. Not now, not ever, not in this country. Governor George Ryan first suspended then commuted the sentences of all death row inmates in Illinois because he was shown proof (most of it DNA driven) that several prisoners—as many as twelve of the eighteen—simply weren’t guilty.
    The Innocence Project, founded by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufield in 1992 at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, accepts only cases “where postconviction DNA testing can yield conclusive proof of innocence.” Of their first 123 exonerations, 37 were for homicides. One of those cases involved Eddie Joe Lloyd, a black, mentally retarded man convicted of the brutal killing of a sixteen-year-old girl in 1984. Mr. Lloyd served seventeen years in a Michigan state prison before the Innocence Project, joined by the Wayne County Prosecutor and the Detroit Police Department, petitioned to have his sentence vacated. Evidence developed by the Project revealed that although the police had all kinds of physical evidence at the scene, including the killer’s semen, they’d never had it analyzed. Further,