Breaking Rank by Norm Stamper Page A

they told Lloyd that if he played along with his arrest they might be able to flush out the real killer. Lloyd did “play along,” signing a confession the cops had fed him. The judge in his case, barred from imposing a death sentence, had wanted to hang Lloyd, to face “termination by extreme con[striction].”
    Mentally incompetent defendants—some with sub-50 IQs, some (like self-lobotomized Rickey Ray Rector, executed in Arkansas under Governor Bill Clinton) with the mentality of a six-year-old —are still put to death in this country. Those with mental retardation are incapable of informed participation in their own defense, and they are far more likely to make false confessions. The U.S. Supreme Court in November 2002 stayed the execution of James Colburn, forty-two, who had started seeing a psychiatrist when he was fourteen and who was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenicat seventeen. Colburn, a Texan who killed a woman he’d attempted to rape, was out of his mind on psychotropic drugs at his trial. It would have been “cruel and unusual punishment,” said the court, to execute such a transparently incompetent person. They sent the case back to Texas where a state doctor, who agreed Colburn was mentally disturbed, opined that the man was sane enough to stand trial. Convicted and sentenced once again to death, the execution was carried out in March 2003. On death row Colburn was known as “Shaky” because of the tremors in his hands and body. He ate his own feces, drank his own urine. Even the warden was said to be distressed over the execution.
    Prosecutions of capital cases, often waged against fundamentally unfit court-appointed defense attorneys, frequently rely on unreliable witnesses, shoddy police work, questionable forensics, and jailhouse snitches. Two federal court judges, an appeals court panel, and a Los Angeles superior court judge ruled recently that Lee Goldstein had been wrongly convicted of murder on the basis of testimony from a jailhouse snitch—twenty years ago. Goldstein is fifty-five now.
    The death penalty is inefficient and extravagantly expensive: prosecuting and publicly defending a capital case—through up to eleven years of appeals—can cost taxpayers into the eight figures, plus an additional $2 million for the execution. The average cost of incarceration for one inmate on death row is $22,265 a year ($61 a day) at a maximum security facility. The average time an inmate spends on death row (before he or she is executed, released, or remanded for a new trial) is 10.43 years. That comes to a grand total of $233,000.
    If these aren’t reasons enough to do away with the death penalty, this ought to be persuasive: according to the Innocence Project, as of 2003, 132 people sentenced to death had been exonerated—in other words, they didn’t do it. Experts aren’t sure how many innocent people have actually been executed, but few would disagree that one is too many.
    Some argue that the death penalty is wrong not because of what it does to the person we execute, whether guilty or innocent, but because of what it does to the rest of us. Bud Welch, who lost his daughter Julie Marie in the April 19, 1995, Oklahoma City bombing, told CNN News, “I’m not going to find any healing by taking Tim McVeigh out of his cage to kill him. Itwill not bring my little girl back.” Welch became a board member of Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, an organization headed by Renny Cushing of Hampton, New Hampshire. Cushing’s father had been killed by a police officer in 1988. He says that most loved ones of homicide victims have three basic needs: to learn the truth about what happened, to receive assurances that the killer will be held accountable, and to be allowed to heal in their own time, in their own way. Executions, he says, produce a “carnival-like” atmosphere and shift attention from the victim to