http://www.kystandard.com/node/127295 Also, the state may have a capital defender system to provide legal aid to death-row inmates, but the report documents that all defenders handling capital cases are overworked, and far Death penalty should be done away with exceed national averages and recommended maximums for caseloads. By The Kentucky Standard Editorial Board Saturday, September 27, 2014 at 12:32 pm These are only two of several reported flaws. And several other facets of the state system would have been analyzed, but sufficient In the last Kentucky General Assembly session, Rep. David Floyd, evidence to do so could not be obtained due to a lack of recorded R-Bardstown, sponsored a bill that sought to abolish the death data. penalty in the state. Sadly, little came out of that session, and the bill went nowhere. You might not see the death penalty as a financial burden on the state and violation of the respect for life that it is, and you may In a state that aspires to be seen as progressive and that is striving support its use. Even if that’s the case and Floyd’s bill or a similar to overcome backwoods stereotypes, the death penalty needs to be one does not lead to its abolition, at the very least, there should be done away with. some serious overhaul of the system that decides who lives and who dies. Unfortunately, an overhaul will take incredible amounts Monday evening, a former Alabama death row inmate spoke at the of time and money. And for what — another broken system? Basilica of St. Joseph Proto-Cathedral as part of a tour sponsored by the group Witness to Innocence. WTI is the only group in the Abolishing the death penalty is the only sane solution. made up of and led by exonerated death row inmates and its mission is to abolish the death penalty. According to the group, for every nine prisoners executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, one innocent person was sentenced to death and later exonerated. They note that the U.S. justice system is full of flaws, poor legal representation, prejudice, prosecutorial misconduct, false confession and eyewitness error, among others.

You might not see any errors in the Kentucky system. Think again.

• Kentucky holds the record for the most executions in a single day. On July 13, 1928, seven men died in the in Eddyville.

• On Aug. 14, 1936, Rainey Bethea was executed by public in Owensboro. His was the last public execution in the country. Hanging as execution sounds medieval, but in reality, the last execution by hanging in the U.S. took place in 1996, in Delaware, only 18 years ago.

• As far as exonerations go, Kentucky’s most recent is Larry Osborne, who was acquitted after a retrial in 2002 for two murders in 1997. He was released after an engineer’s testimony not heard at his initial trial, backed up his story from the night of the murders.

• From 1976 to 2011, there were 82 capital offenses in Kentucky leading to 78 death sentences. State or federal courts reversed the sentences in 50 of those 82 cases as a result of an error that occurred at trial.

In December 2011, the American Bar Association released The Kentucky Death Penalty Assessment Report. It explains that the death penalty must be reserved for the worst crimes, ensure due process and minimize the risk of executing the innocent. It explains that the state has created a public defender system to represent death row inmates, adopted a post-conviction DNA testing statute and enacted a Racial Justice Act to avoid racial and ethnic bias in death penalty cases.

However, it then explains that the state fails to comply or only partially complies with its own protocol.

The report’s assessment team found that there is inadequate protection to guard against wrongful conviction. Evidence, even capital cases, is not required to be retained for the entire time a defendant is incarcerated. It can even be destroyed under state law. This makes retrial on the grounds of wrongful conviction difficult and diminishes the effectiveness of the post-conviction DNA testing stature. What good does it do for someone who has been convicted to request testing if the evidence was lawfully destroyed?