Alaskans Against the Death Penalty

Nineteen years after having been sentenced to death in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, and five years after winning a new trial, Ronald Champney entered a no-contest plea to lesser charges in a plea deal that could soon set him free. Under the plea deal, which the court accepted on August 10, 2018, Champney agreed—without admitting guilt—that prosecutors had sufficient evidence for a jury to convict him of third-degree murder and possessing instruments of crime, and prosecutors withdrew charges of first-degree murder, burglary, aggravated assault, and other related offenses. The court resentenced Champney to a term of 10 to 20 years imprisonment, much of which he has already served. With death-penalty reversals and non-capital resentencings far outstripping new death sentences, Pennsylvania's death row has fallen by 100 in the last 16 years—from 247 in April 2002 to 147 on August 1, 2018—without any executions. 170 Pennsylvania death-row prisoners have overturned their convictions or death sentences in state or federal post-conviction proceedings and Pennsylvania's state courts have reversed an additional 100 death sentences on direct appeal. Champney's case is one of 139 of the cases reversed in post-conviction to have completed retrial or resentencing, and he is one of the 135 defendants (97.1%) to be resentenced to life or less or acquitted. Of the prisoners who were resentenced to death, only three are still on death row, and another died before his post-conviction challenges to that sentence were adjudicated. Champney was convicted and sentenced to death in 1999 for a murder that occurred in 1992. In June 2008, the trial court overturned his death sentence because his lawyer failed to object to the prosecution's presentation of victim-impact testimony that was not admissible under Pennsylvania law. The court also granted Champney a new trial, finding that his lawyer had been ineffective for failing to move to suppress statements police had improperly obtained from Champney while interrogating him without his lawyer being present. An equally divided Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the trial court's ruling in April 2013, setting the stage for the plea agreement. On June 25, the Pennsylvania state senate's Task Force and Advisory Committee on Capital Punishment issued a report describing the Commonwealth's death-penalty system as seriously flawed and in need of major reform, in part because of high rates of constitutional error and substandard defense representation at trial.

(Peter E. Bortner, Champney leaves death row, pleads no contest to murder, Republican Herard, August 10, 2018.) See Pennsylvania and Sentencing.

Calling Oklahoma “the notorious home of ‘Hang ’Em High’ executions,” conservative commentator and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin (pictured) has urged the state to adopt sytemic reforms to address its “wretched record on wrongful convictions.” Malkin says that despite 35 exonerations in the last 25 years—including 7 death-row exonerations—and a “reign of prosecutorial terror and forensic error by the late Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy and rogue Oklahoma City police department crime lab analyst Joyce Gilchrist,” the state has failed to create a forensic science commission to investigates errors and professional misconduct by crime labs and forensic analysts and “not a single Oklahoma district attorney’s office has established an official mechanism to review tainted convictions.” In an August 8, 2018 commentary for the Creators Syndicate, Malkin warns that “‘Frontier justice’ costs too many citizens of all races, creeds, and backgrounds their freedom and their lives.” She says, “In the old days of the Wild West, vigilantes worked outside the judicial system to punish rivals regardless of their guilt or innocence. Today, outlaws operate inside the bureaucracy to secure criminal convictions at all costs.” In her commentary, Malkin highlights the death-penalty exonerations of Curtis McCarty and Robert Lee Miller, Jr., and current appeals attempting to free death-row prisoner Julius Jones. Notorious former Oklahoma County District Attorney Bob Macy withheld evidence from McCarty’s attorneys, and crime lab analyst Joyce Gilchrist, implicated in at least 11 wrongful convictions, falsified and destroyed forensic evidence. Gilchrist’s false testimony in the case included claims that hairs found at the crime scene matched McCarty’s and that his blood type matched the semen found on the victim’s body. They didn’t. Miller’s case was also tainted by bad forensics and a coerced false confession. Malkin points to the case of Julius Jones—recently featured in the documentary series The Last Defense—as emblematic of some of the ongoing problems in Oklahoma cases. Jones, who is seeking appellate review of evidence that supports his innocence claims, filed motions for discovery and a request for an evidentiary hearing in December 2017. Under instructions of a court clerk, they placed supporting evidence in a sealed envelope labeled “protected material.” That crucial evidence was not presented to the court and disappeared for six months until Jones’ investigator was able to uncover them herself in the clerk’s office. The court initially rejected Jones’ appeal, but will now reconsider, due to the clerk’s “mismanagement of the exhibits.” Another Oklahoma County death-row prisoner, Richard Glossip, was convicted and sentenced to death based on solely on the testimony of a 19-year-old who confessed to the murder and then implicated Glossip in exchange for a reduced sentence. No physical evidence linked Glossip to the crime, the teen gave investigators multiple contradictory descriptions of the murder before adopting police suggestions that Glossip was involved, and two witnesses who have come forward with evidence of Glossip’s innocence say they have been subjected to retaliation and intimidation by prosecutors. Oklahoma, Malkin says, “stands out for its decades of trampling due process, subverting public disclosure, perpetuating forensic junk science, manufacturing false accusations and enabling official misconduct.” She says that, given the state’s record and its recent “chilling” history of “horrific botched executions,” permitting the state to resume executions poses a “human rights crisis.” Silence in the face of that crisis, she says, “is complicity.”

(Michelle Malkin, Oklahoma's Wretched Record on Wrongful Convictions, Creators Syndicate, August 8, 2018.) See Innocence, Prosecutorial Misconduct, and New Voices.