The Rap Sheet

Sen. Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican Senator since 1968, was convicted by a jury of seven felony charges on Oct. 27, 2008. The felonies all involved corruption.  Stevens accepted huge gifts from oil corporations, but never bothered to report them.

Echoing the reactions of multitudes of convicted felons, Stevens immediately proclaimed his innocence and called the jury's verdict unjust. He blamed the verdict on prosecutorial misconduct and vowed that he would get it overturned on appeal. Blah, blah, blah -- so say all the powerful hypocrites like Stevens when they finally get caught.

What's particularly delicious about Stevens' professed faith in the appellate process is its newness. In fact, Stevens wasn't always such a big fan of appeals. Back in the mid-1990s, Stevens voted to limit the right of state court prisoners sentenced to death to appeal their convictions. Isn't it too bad that prisoners sentenced to death don't have the right to vote on Stevens' right to appeal?

Prior to his conviction, Stevens had gained notoriety for championing fiscal conservatism while earmarking huge sums of taxpayer money for pet projects that would benefit big Alaska donors. The most famous of these earmarks was the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere," a ridiculously expensive project that would have reduced the travel time between two sparsely populated villages in Alaska.

Stevens' conviction may indicate that he never quite got that earmark fiasco out of his mind. When he comes up for sentencing in January of 2009, Stevens may find that he has built a Bridge to Prison.

Charles Dean Hood was sentenced to death in Texas for committing a double murder.  ("Hood" is certainly an unfortunate surname for a person facing criminal charges.) On the eve of his execution, Hood may gain a reprieve based on a "sex appeal". Hood's lawyers have uncovered evidence that while Judge Verla Sue Holland was presiding over Hood's trial and D.A. Thomas O'Connell Sr. was assisting in his prosecution, they were carrying on a secret love affair.      

If Holland and O'Connell were indeed litigating by day and fornicating by night, they grossly disregarded their ethical responsibilities and wasted a lot of Texas taxpayers' money if Hood (and possibly many other convicted criminals whose cases they participated in) have to be re-tried. 

The American Bar Association Code of Judicial Conduct (which admittedly does not have the force of law) admonishes judges not to engage in conduct that "would create in reasonable minds a perception that the judge's ability to carry out judicial responsibilities with integrity, impartiality and competence is impaired." While this language may be vague and hortatory, certainly the perception (if not the reality) of partiality arises when a judge and a prosecutor are literally in bed together.

As for D.A. O'Connell, Standard 3-1.3 of the American Bar Assoiation Criminal Justice Standards states in part that, "A prosecutor should not permit his or her professional judgment or obligations to be affected by... personal interests."

If the evidence of the affair is accurate, Holland's and O'Connell's behavior is irresponsible and unfathomable. After all, Hood was charged with capital murder, not spitting on the sidewalk. Legal ethics required either Holland or O'Connell to leave the case. Since they did not do so, they apparently felt a greater responsibility to their secret love affair than to their professional obligations. The episode undercuts the claim that while the U.S. system of justice cannot guarantee correct outcomes, it can guarantee a fair process.    

While 37 states continue to authorize the death penalty, evidence continues to accumulate which shows that it may be headed for extinction in the United States. Consider these recent developments:

1. The number of executions actually carried out continues to decline each year.  Forty-two executions were carried out in 2007, compared to 53 in 2006 and 71 in 2002.  
2. In 2007, 110 death sentences were handed down, compared to 114 in 2006 and 128 in 2005.
3. Forty eight states authorize the sentence of Life Without Possibility of Parole (LWOP), a sentence increasingly favored by juries as an alternative to the death penalty.
4. In the case of Kennedy v. Louisiana (2008) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that child rapists cannot be sentenced to death. This decision is consistent with the Court's other recent death penalty rulings, including the ones making it unconstitutional to execute people who rape adults (Coker v. Georgia, 1977), who are mentally retarded (Atkins v. Virginia, 2002) or who were under the age of 18 at the time of a crime (Roper v. Simmons, 2005).
5. A June 2008 report issued by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice (PDF) concluded that the state spends $138 million per year on the death penalty, and that it could save $100 million of that by replacing the death penalty with LWOP.

Polls indicate that a majority of Americans still favor the death penalty. However, as reflected by the steady decrease in the number of death sentences handed down, support is eroding. If these trends continue and the death penalty eventually fades into oblivion, the official Cause of Death may be listed as "too expensive".

In 1979, 12-year-old Robin Samsoe disappeared.  She was supposed to be on her way to ballet class but never arrived. About two weeks later, the police found her remains some 50 miles away. About a month later, Rodney Alcala was arrested and charged with murdering her. He was convicted and sentenced to death. But that's hardly the end of the story: Nearly 30 years after Robin was killed, both Alcala and the case remain very much alive.

In 1984, the California Supreme Court reversed the conviction and ordered a new trial. The Court ruled that the trial judge had improperly allowed the jurors to hear evidence of Alcala's attacks on other young girls. So Alcala was again tried and convicted of killing Robin, but this time the California Supreme Court upheld the conviction.

Having exhausted his state court remedies, in 1994, Alcala filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. Nearly an entire decade passed before a federal court of appeal upheld the petition and again set aside Alcala's conviction. This time, the primary reason was that Alcala's trial lawyer was incompetent. The attorney had presented alibi evidence, but inexplicably failed to call the alibi witnesses who would have placed Alcala in another location at the time Robin disappeared.

Alcala now faces a third trial for killing Robin Samsoe. While Alcala has remained imprisoned, the police have uncovered DNA evidence allegedly linking Alcala to the murders of four other young women that took place between 1977 and 1979, so he now faces five charges of murder.

Is Alcala's case a shining example of our legal system at its best, trying to ensure that a man is not executed for a murder that he may not have committed after being represented by an incompetent lawyer? Or does his case portray our system at its worst, forcing Robin's family to watch as the courts bat a serial killer's case endlessly back and forth like a ping pong ball? At this point, either conclusion seems reasonable. What do you think?