A review of Virginia’s death penalty aimed at improving fairness and accuracy calls for safeguards in the use of suspect lineups and more access by defense lawyers to information to help them prepare cases.
The recommendations are among more than a dozen in the two-year effort sponsored by the American Bar Association’s Death Penalty Assessment Project that since 2003 has studied and reported on the death penalty in 10 other states.
“If you’re going to have a death penalty, I think everyone would agree we have to get it right,” Mark L. Earley, a former Virginia attorney general and member of the Virginia Death Penalty Assessment Team, said Thursday.
“This wasn’t a project about whether Virginia should have the death penalty or should not have the death penalty. It wasn’t a project about whether we should have a moratorium on the death penalty,” Earley said.
“It was really a project that (considers) this: If a state is going to have the death penalty, how can we be sure it has integrity and that it is accurate and fair in all respects,” he added.
A top-priority change urged by the study is to require law enforcement agencies to adopt the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services’ model eyewitness identification policy for suspect photo and live lineups.
Misidentification played a role in the wrongful convictions of 18 Virginians later proved innocent in non-death penalty cases.
According to the Virginia Department of Corrections, Virginia has executed 110 killers — 31 by electrocution and 79 by injection — since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976.
The toll is second nationally only to Texas, which has executed 503. But in Virginia three out of four persons sentenced to death since 1976 have been executed — a higher rate than even in Texas, which has carried out roughly half its death sentences.
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sept. 6, 2013