On Friday, May 26, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey (pictured) signed into law a statute denominated the “Fair Justice Act,” which is designed to shorten the state death-penalty appeals process. The law constricts the amount of time death-row prisoners have to file appeals, imposes time limits for judges to rule on appeals, and requires prisoners to pursue their direct appeal and post-conviction appeal simultaneously, including raising claims of appellate counsel’s ineffectiveness while appellate counsel is still handling the case. Governor Ivey characterized the law—which will apply to all defendants sentenced to death on or after August 1, 2017—as “strik[ing] an important balance between protecting the rights of a defendant and the state’s interest in allowing justice to be achieved effectively and swiftly.” Alabama Attorney General, Steve Marshall, said the statute “streamlines the appellate process” but “does not diminish the thoroughness of appellate review of death penalty cases.” Critics of the law, however, say that is precisely what it does. Linda Klein, the President of the American Bar Association—which calls for fair process in the administration of capital punishment but takes no position on the death penalty itself—said that the new law “unduly limit[s] counsel’s ability to conduct that critical post-conviction investigation” and will “make Alabama an outlier on how appeals and post-conviction cases are handled.” Birmingham civil-rights attorney Lisa Borden said Alabama capital cases typically suffer from a lack of “detailed investigation” into what the issues in the case actually are and if the state curtails the time for post-conviction investigation, “you are going to have people whose valid claims, whose important claims [are] cut off forever and people are going to die.” She said, “If Alabama really wants to fix the process[, it should] … provide competent representation and resources to people from the beginning.” The National Registry of Exonerations has found that more than half of all murder exonerations involved prosecutorial failures to disclose exculpatory evidence, and that official misconduct was present in 87% of death-row exonerations of black defendants and 67% of death-row exonerations of white defendants. The study also showed that it took an average of four years longer to exonerate an innocent black defendant wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to death than a wrongly convicted white death-row prisoner. Anthony Ray Hinton, an innocent African-American man who spent nearly 30 years on Alabama’s death row for a crime he did not commit, has said that if he were convicted under the Fair Justice Act, “I would have been executed despite my innocence.” Hinton says it took more than 14 years before he was able to obtain the competent representation and expert assistance necessary to prove his innocence.
(M. Cason, Gov. Kay Ivey signs bill intended to shorten death penalty appeals, AL.com, May 26, 2017; J. Gauntt, ‘Fair Justice Act’ to speed up appeal process for death row inmates, WAFF.com, May 25, 2017; Letter from Linda Klein, President of the American Bar Association to Alabama Legislature, May 12, 2017; A. Hinton, “I was released from death row. Under the Fair Justice Act, I’d be dead.,” AL.com, April 27, 2017.) See Recent Legislative Activity, Arbitrariness, Innocence, and Race.
