New York Times

Editorial

The Supreme Court is meet­ing today to con­sid­er the fate of Delma Banks Jr., a Texas death row inmate whose exe­cu­tion it tem­porar­i­ly halt­ed last month. Mr. Banks’s con­vic­tion was marred by malfea­sance by the pros­e­cu­tors, ter­ri­ble work by his own lawyers and racial dis­crim­i­na­tion in jury selec­tion. And there is seri­ous doubt about his guilt. The Supreme Court must not allow him to be put to death.

Mr. Banks, a black man, was con­vict­ed of mur­der 23 years ago by an all-white jury. In jury selec­tion, the pros­e­cu­tors dis­qual­i­fied all four of the black poten­tial jurors. The state did not find wit­ness­es or evi­dence link­ing Mr. Banks direct­ly to the crime or a motive. And it did not turn over evi­dence that would have allowed Mr. Banks to chal­lenge the cred­i­bil­i­ty of the main wit­ness­es against him. Holding back that sort of mate­r­i­al vio­lates due process and long­stand­ing Supreme Court precedent.

Mr. Banks had strik­ing­ly bad legal rep­re­sen­ta­tion at tri­al. When the court was con­sid­er­ing whether to impose the death penal­ty, his lawyer did not even both­er to inter­view wit­ness­es before putting them on the stand. A Federal District Court over­turned Mr. Banks’s death sen­tence on the basis of this ​“defi­cient per­for­mance.” But an appeals court reversed that deci­sion on the dubi­ous basis that Mr. Banks could not show that he would have had a dif­fer­ent out­come with a better lawyer.

The Supreme Court agreed to step in moments before Mr. Banks was sched­uled to be put to death. It was no doubt influ­enced by a brief from for­mer pros­e­cu­tors, fed­er­al judges and oth­er offi­cials, among them William Sessions, who is a for­mer direc­tor of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and a for­mer fed­er­al judge in Texas. Mr. Banks’s case, they said, direct­ly impli­cates ​“the integri­ty of the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty in this country.”

As trou­bling as Mr. Banks’s case is, it is hard­ly iso­lat­ed. A study of more than 4,000 cap­i­tal cas­es found that near­ly 70 per­cent of them con­tained seri­ous errors. The Supreme Court should set aside Mr. Banks’s exe­cu­tion to pre­vent a mis­car­riage of jus­tice — and to send a mes­sage about the stan­dard that pros­e­cu­tors and courts must meet before they put some­one to death.