In the Shadow of Death — Letters from a friend on death row shed light on the ultimate legal penalty
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Amy, you ask me what's going on here? It's really nothing going on here, beyond existing around so many lost souls. The situation here is chaotic, only because so many are miserable. Aside from that, the system under which we exist here is set up to keep inmates at odds and distracted pending their court of appeals. And the way inmates be acting around here, one does not know who's who or who can be trusted. I wouldn't wish this kind of existing on no human soul. Please don't misunderstand. There are some good people here too. However, evil seem to be the thing most here are accustom to, probably because they stand condemned internally. Broken. The environment itself is strange, and you hit it on the nose when you stated, "It must be a very unforgiving place." I mention to you already, I've been a victim since I've been here. Not because I am wrong in my walk here, but more because I have the spirit of life in my soul...
Andre Burton has lived on death row all of his adult life, from the age of 20 to the age of 43. When he was 19, he was convicted of shooting to death the mother of a convenience store clerk in a robbery. He claims to have been wrongfully convicted. His current defense lawyers assert that he was denied a defense during the guilt phase of his initial trial.
In fact, in October of 1997 the California Supreme Court did something it rarely does: It issued a "show cause" order challenging the attorney general's office to show cause why Andre's murder conviction and death sentence should not be overturned. The grounds stated by the order are that he "was denied the right to present a defense at the guilt phase of trial." His attorney failed him, in other words.
The required evidentiary hearing was held in 2003, followed by an extended exchange of legal briefs between the state attorney general's office and his defense lawyers, which was completed in October 2005. Now Andre waits. He has no idea when the Supreme Court will reach a decision regarding his appeal, other than sometime this year.
If Andre Burton's appeal is upheld, he will join a surprisingly large group of death row prisoners who have been exonerated after conviction. In a Nov. 9, 1998, U.S. News and World Report article titled "The Wrong Men on Death Row," author Joseph Shapiro observed that, for every seven executions in the United States, one death row prisoner had been found innocent.
Most of the convictions were overturned because of bad lawyering on the part of defense attorneys. In fact, in 1997 the American Bar Association, representing all of the nation's attorneys, went so far as to call for a moratorium on the death penalty because of "the prevalence of bad lawyering and mistaken convictions."
Studies have shown that poor defendants, those at the mercy of court-appointed attorneys whose best claim to competence may be how quickly they move capital cases through the courts, are particularly vulnerable to being wrongfully convicted.
Andre Burton is a good example of this. He grew up in the ghettos of Los Angeles--in Compton and Long Beach. He had no money to pay for an attorney when he was accused of robbery and murder at the age of 19.