A Kern County Superior Court judge last week ordered that a 68-year-old former
farmworker, Vicente Benavides Figueroa, be released from San Quentin's death
row after the local district attorney declared she would not retry him.
Benavides had been in prison for more than 25 years after being convicted of
raping, sodomizing and murdering his girlfriend's 21-month-old daughter.
Benavides was freed after all but one of the medical experts who testified
against him recanted their conclusions that the girl had, in effect, been raped
to death - conclusions they had reached after reviewing incomplete medical
records.
In fact, the first nurses and doctors who examined the semiconscious
and battered girl in 1991 observed no injuries suggesting she had been raped or
sodomized, but those details were not passed along to the medical expert
witnesses who testified in court.
Injuries later observed at 2 other hospitals
were likely caused by that 1st effort to save her life, which included attempts
to insert an adult-sized catheter.
Convicting Benavides was an egregious miscarriage of justice; he spent a
quarter-century on death row for a crime he apparently did not commit. His
exoneration serves as a reminder of what ought to be abundantly clear by now:
that despite jury trials, appellate reconsideration and years of motions and
counter-motions, the justice system is not infallible, and it is possible (or
perhaps inevitable) that innocent people will end up facing execution at the
hands of the state. Not all of them will be saved, as Benavides was.
Innocent people end up facing execution at the hands of the state. The case
also ought to remind us of the dangers inherent in California's efforts to
speed up the calendar for death penalty appeals under Proposition 66, which
voters approved in 2016.
Moving more quickly to execute convicted death row
inmates increases the likelihood that due process will be given short shrift
and the innocent will be put to death. Benavides - described in court filings
as a seasonal worker with intellectual disabilities - was convicted in 1993.
But the records that blew up the case against Benavides, but also raised doubt
that Consuelo Verdugo had been murdered at all, were not uncovered until about
2000.
Proposition 66 makes it less likely that such diligent research can be
completed in the single year it gives appellate attorneys to file their cases
(a process that currently consumes 3 years or more), and thus more likely that
innocent people will be put to death.
This rush-to-execute mood isn't California's alone. Florida adopted its own
speed-up legislation 5 years ago. And around the country, pro-death penalty
advocates argue that the condemned take advantage of the appeals process to
delay their executions.
Federal statistics for 2013, the last year available,
show an average of 15 1/2 years between sentence and execution for people on
death row in the U.S. At least 365 people have been on California's death row
for 20 years or more.
Benavides was released after more than 25 years. 2 half-brothers in North
Carolina spent about 30 years under death sentences before they were
exonerated. Since the Supreme Court revived the death penalty in 1976, more
than 150 people have been exonerated of the murders for which they were
condemned (in most cases that also meant the real killers got away with it),
with an average of more than 11 years between sentence and exoneration.
A 2014
study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
estimated that at least 4% of the people sitting on America's death rows are
probably innocent. With a national death row population of 2,700 people, that
means more than 100 people currently under death sentences probably are
innocent - about 30 of them in California. A rush to execution will only
increase the chances that state governments will execute the innocent in the
name of the people.
The unfixable problem with the death penalty is that mistakes get made,
witnesses lie, confessions get coerced - all factors that can lead to false
convictions. It is abjectly immoral to speed things up by limiting due process.
The better solution is to get rid of the death penalty altogether.
Source: Los Angeles Times, Editorial Board, April 27, 2018
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
