USA
- Texas fight takes on race and death penalty - Seven men on death
row may be there in part because of race, attorney general says.
By
Julie Blase - Special to The Christian Science Monitor
AUSTIN,
TEXAS There is a correlation between race and violent behavior,
the expert witness testified. Just look at the disproportionate
numbers of black and Hispanic men in prison. That testimony has
now touched off a Texas-size controversy, involving the Lone Star
State's attorney general, its highest criminal appeals court, and
seven men on death row. At issue is whether the expert witness's
words unfairly influenced juries to mete out death sentences -
instead of, say, life in prison - in the cases of the minority
convicts. SEARCH FOR JUSTICE: Texas Attorney General John Cornyn
has said that seven men on death row deserve new sentencing trials,
because an expert witness's testimony may have influenced jurors
to sentence them based on their race. The Texas Court of Criminal
Appeals so far has refused. DEBORAH CANNON/AP Attorney General
John Cornyn, a Republican, has acknowledged that the testimony
should not have been permitted - and that the seven inmates
deserve new sentencing trials. But so far, the Texas Court of
Criminal Appeals has refused to grant all seven inmates new
hearings. The issue is now attracting international attention
because one of the men is an Argentine. Victor Hugo Saldano was
convicted and sentenced to die for the 1995 robbery and murder of
a Texas man. Mr. Saldano's guilt is not in question. The issue is
whether the prosecution's argument that Saldano is a threat to
society, in part because he is Hispanic, swayed the jury's
decision to levy the death penalty. "One of the clearest
principles of American constitutional law is that race is an
inappropriate basis upon which to make official decisions,"
says James Liebman, a professor at Columbia University Law School
in New York. The 14th Amendment mandates that US law applies
equally to all. The Texas Constitution says the same. However, as
recently as the 1950s, judges in the South, including Texas,
allowed juries to assess different penalties to people of
different races convicted of the same crimes.Under Texas law, a
jury assessing the death penalty must find that a defendant poses
a continuing threat to society. Expert witness Walter Quijano, a
psychologist, told Saldano's jury there are 24 statistical
predictors of criminal behavior, including socioeconomic status,
family history, drug abuse, the deliberateness of the crime, and
the defendant's age and gender. Does race influence how the death
penalty is applied in the US? Vote and discuss here. Quijano also
told the jury that because blacks and Hispanics are
overrepresented in the Texas criminal-justice system, race is
correlated with criminal behavior. The jury sentenced Saldano to
death. Saldano's request for a rehearing was denied by the Court
of Criminal Appeals because his attorney had not objected to the
race argument at trial. Enter the Supreme Court Subsequently, the
Argentine consul in Texas obtained a new lawyer for Saldano, who
took the case directly to the US Supreme Court. At that point,
Attorney General Cornyn learned of the case and agreed that race
should not have been raised during trial. In an unusual step, he
submitted a brief to the Supreme Court, arguing that Texas' Court
of Criminal Appeals erred in upholding Saldano's death sentence.
"The use of race in Saldano's sentencing seriously undermined
the public reputation of the judicial process," Mr. Cornyn's
brief to the US Supreme Court stated. The high court ordered the
Texas court to reconsider Saldano's case in light of the attorney
general's confession of error, and granted Saldano a stay of
execution. In response, the Texas criminal appeals court
questioned whether Cornyn, as the state's attorney, is
constitutionally bound to support its decisions even if he finds
them troubling. Last month, the Texas court reheard Saldano's case
for a new sentencing hearing. Representatives of eight Latin
American governments attended the arguments. They "obviously
have a great interest in the outcome of this case," says
Houston lawyer Scott Atlas, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief
with the US Supreme Court, supported by 11 Latin American nations,
including Argentina, Mexico, and Venezuela. In addition to
deciding whether Saldano deserves a new hearing, the jurists are
in the unprecedented position of deciding who has authority to
regulate the court itself. If it rules against Cornyn, he and his
successors would be prohibited from disagreeing publicly with the
court in future cases. Quijano, for his part, says he has been
testifying for 20 years, mostly for the defense, but also as a
prosecution witness. No lawyers have objected to his testimony in
the past, he says. Race is significant because it is linked to
problems such as poverty, lack of opportunity, and poor education
- but correlations are not causal, Quijano says. "Nobody in
his right mind would say that because someone is black, he is
violent." But if race is not discussed, he adds, "then
we quit asking, why is it like that? Then we don't do anything
about their schooling, their education - that is the root of the
problem." Quijano claims it is accurate to say that race is
correlated with a high incidence of contact with the
criminal-justice system. African-Americans, for example, make up
12 percent of Texas' general population, but 41 percent of
death-row inmates. Systemic bias? But others remain unconvinced.
"I take any use of race as a predictor of criminal or violent
behavior ... to be junk science," says Bryan Stevenson of the
Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala. "Every analysis
shows that people of color don't use drugs more than white people.
Yet at each stage of the [criminal] process, people of color loom
larger.... It says a lot about the way we arrest, prosecute, and
convict based on race." The district attorney in Saldano's
case, Tom O'Connell, says the race factor was a small part of
Quijano's testimony, and likely played no part in the jury's
sentence of death. The race testimony "shouldn't be defended,"
he says, but it has been taken out of context and was not
presented in an inflammatory way. Meanwhile, the Texas Legislature
is considering a bill that bans the use of race or ethnicity as a
factor in criminal sentencing. (CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR)
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