on crime and punishment. Each judge competes to be the toughest on crime. The people financing these elections are largely unconcerned with whatever modest differences exist between candidates on crime, but punishment gets the votes.Judge overrides are an incredibly potent political tool. No judge wants to deal with attack ads that highlight the grisly details of a murder case in which the judge failed to impose the most severe punishment. Seen in that light,it’s not surprising that judge overrides tend to increase in election years.
We wrote a letter to the governor of Alabama, Guy Hunt, asking him to stop the Lindsey execution on the grounds that the jury, empowered to pass judgment on him, had decided against putting him to death. Governor Hunt quickly denied our request for clemency, declaring that he would not “go against the wishes of the communityexpressed by the jury that Mr. Lindsey be put to death,” even though we stressed that the community’s representatives—the jury—had done the opposite; it clearly elected to spare Lindsey’s life. It didn’t matter.As peculiar as the practice is, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld judicial override in an earlier Florida case, which left us with no constitutional basis to block Michael Lindsey’s execution. He was electrocuted on May 26, 1989.
Immediately after Lindsey, we were faced with Horace Dunkins’s execution date. Once again, we tried to help in whatever ways we could, even though time was quickly running out and there was little hope.Mr. Dunkins suffered from intellectual disabilities, and the trial judge found he had “mental retardation” based on his school records and earlier testing. Just a few months before his execution was scheduled, the Supreme Court upheld the practice of executing the “mentally retarded.”Thirteen years later, in
Atkins v. Virginia
, the Court recognized that executing people with intellectual disabilities is cruel and unusual punishment and banned the practice as unconstitutional. For many condemned and disabled people like Horace Dunkins, the ban came too late.
The Dunkins family called frequently, trying to figure out what could be done with only days to go before his execution, but there were very few options. When it became clear there was no way to stop the execution, the family turned their attention to what would happen to Mr. Dunkins’s body after his death. They seemed particularly concerned, for religious reasons, with preventing the state from performing an autopsy on their son’s body. The date of the execution arrived, and Horace Dunkins was killed in a botched execution that made national news. Correctional officials had plugged the electrodes into the chair incorrectly, so only a partial electrical charge was delivered to Mr. Dunkins’s body when the electric chair was activated. After several agonizing minutes, the chair was turned off but Mr. Dunkins was still alive, unconscious but breathing. Officials waited several more minutes “for the body to cool” before realizing that the electrodes had not been connected properly. They made alterations and electrocutedMr. Dunkins again, and this time it worked.They killed him. Following this cruelly mishandled execution, the state performed an autopsy—against the family’s repeated requests.
I received a call from Mr. Dunkins’s distraught father after the execution. He said, “They could take his life, even though he didn’t get a fair trial and he didn’t deserve that, but they had no right to mess with his body and soul, too. We want to sue them.” We provided some aid to the volunteer lawyer on the case and a suit was filed, although there wasn’t much hope. There were a few depositions but no judgment of relief. The civil suit failed to slow down the State of Alabama, which moved ahead aggressively with more execution dates.
We relocated to our new office in Montgomery in the shadow of these two executions. The men on death row were more
We wrote a letter to the governor of Alabama, Guy Hunt, asking him to stop the Lindsey execution on the grounds that the jury, empowered to pass judgment on him, had decided against putting him to death. Governor Hunt quickly denied our request for clemency, declaring that he would not “go against the wishes of the communityexpressed by the jury that Mr. Lindsey be put to death,” even though we stressed that the community’s representatives—the jury—had done the opposite; it clearly elected to spare Lindsey’s life. It didn’t matter.As peculiar as the practice is, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld judicial override in an earlier Florida case, which left us with no constitutional basis to block Michael Lindsey’s execution. He was electrocuted on May 26, 1989.
Immediately after Lindsey, we were faced with Horace Dunkins’s execution date. Once again, we tried to help in whatever ways we could, even though time was quickly running out and there was little hope.Mr. Dunkins suffered from intellectual disabilities, and the trial judge found he had “mental retardation” based on his school records and earlier testing. Just a few months before his execution was scheduled, the Supreme Court upheld the practice of executing the “mentally retarded.”Thirteen years later, in
Atkins v. Virginia
, the Court recognized that executing people with intellectual disabilities is cruel and unusual punishment and banned the practice as unconstitutional. For many condemned and disabled people like Horace Dunkins, the ban came too late.
The Dunkins family called frequently, trying to figure out what could be done with only days to go before his execution, but there were very few options. When it became clear there was no way to stop the execution, the family turned their attention to what would happen to Mr. Dunkins’s body after his death. They seemed particularly concerned, for religious reasons, with preventing the state from performing an autopsy on their son’s body. The date of the execution arrived, and Horace Dunkins was killed in a botched execution that made national news. Correctional officials had plugged the electrodes into the chair incorrectly, so only a partial electrical charge was delivered to Mr. Dunkins’s body when the electric chair was activated. After several agonizing minutes, the chair was turned off but Mr. Dunkins was still alive, unconscious but breathing. Officials waited several more minutes “for the body to cool” before realizing that the electrodes had not been connected properly. They made alterations and electrocutedMr. Dunkins again, and this time it worked.They killed him. Following this cruelly mishandled execution, the state performed an autopsy—against the family’s repeated requests.
I received a call from Mr. Dunkins’s distraught father after the execution. He said, “They could take his life, even though he didn’t get a fair trial and he didn’t deserve that, but they had no right to mess with his body and soul, too. We want to sue them.” We provided some aid to the volunteer lawyer on the case and a suit was filed, although there wasn’t much hope. There were a few depositions but no judgment of relief. The civil suit failed to slow down the State of Alabama, which moved ahead aggressively with more execution dates.
We relocated to our new office in Montgomery in the shadow of these two executions. The men on death row were more
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