Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project

Source: ABA Journal Report, April 19, 2002
DEATH PENALTY MORATORIUM PROJECT UNDER WAY
ABA Effort Coincides With Illinois Report on Capital Punishment
BY MARK HANSEN

With the launch of its death penalty moratorium implementation project, the ABA is intensifying efforts to achieve a nationwide moratorium on executions until the capital punishment system is reformed.

The project, which began its outreach efforts this month, will press for a halt to executions nationwide until all 38 states with the death penalty undertake a detailed examination of their policies and procedures to ensure that the process is fair and that innocent people aren't being executed.

The timing couldn't be more auspicious.

On Monday, an Illinois commission that spent the past two years examining that state's troubled capital punishment system issued a package proposing sweeping changes, from requiring that police interrogations of capital murder suspects be videotaped to reducing the number of factors that make a defendant eligible for the death penalty.

Illinois is the only death penalty state to have placed a moratorium on executions. But legislation has been introduced in at least 18 other states, according to the ABA's Individual Rights and Responsibilities Section, which has spearheaded the campaign for a moratorium. And more than 60 state and local governments across the country have adopted resolutions in support of a moratorium.

ABA President Robert E. Hirshon, in a prepared statement announcing the launch of the project, says the new phase of the ABA's moratorium effort has one purpose: "What the ABA seeks through this project is justice, pure and simple."

The project, housed in and administered by the rights section, is overseen by a seven-member steering committee of death penalty law and policy experts. Deborah T. Fleischaker, a lawyer with death penalty litigation and public policy experience, is the director. She represented a death row inmate in his federal appeals and coordinated the campaign of a Maryland congressional candidate. The project has a Web site at http://www.abanet.org/moratorium/.

Duke law professor James E. Coleman Jr., who chairs the steering committee, says the project is a logical outgrowth of former ABA President Martha W. Barnett's pledge to involve the ABA more actively in the effort to secure a nationwide moratorium. Barnett, who made the issue a priority of her presidency, convened a symposium of death penalty scholars at the Carter Center in Atlanta in October 2000 to mobilize support for a moratorium within the legal community.

Coleman describes the launch of the project as a concrete step that advances the ABA's support for a rational approach to the death penalty-one that insists on fairness, due process and an adherence to the rule of law.

"We want to be a resource center and a clearinghouse for anyone who wants to find out what's going on with respect to moratorium-related activities in any particular state at any given time," he says.

Coleman says the Illinois commission's 207-page final report makes the same point the ABA has been making since it called for a moratorium on executions in 1997. "It proves what we've been saying all along," he says. "Now we have an actual review of the process done in the manner the ABA has recommended it be done, and the result is exactly what we predicted."

Hirshon, in a separate statement, says only time will tell whether Illinois will implement a fair and equitable capital punishment process. But he also says the process Illinois followed in evaluating its system is one every death penalty state should emulate.

"The release today of the commission's report has set a new standard for how states must approach potential death penalty crimes in our courts," he said.

Fleischaker, the director of the ABA's project, said the Illinois commission's recommendations are bound to get a lot of play in the national media. And anything that highlights the system's flaws should benefit the moratorium movement, she says.

"It underscores the whole reason we need a moratorium in the first place," she says.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit clearinghouse for capital punishment information, says the Illinois commission's report offers a blueprint for what other death penalty states should be doing. "I have a feeling this one won't be the last," he says.