Death penalty foes long have suspected that innocents are scattered among the 725 people executed since the Supreme Court revived capital punishment 25 years ago. And some of them are looking to DNA to prove it. New DNA tests of old samples of blood or semen could demonstrate, once and for all, whether an executed man was innocent or guilty. "DNA has the ability to reach back to the grave," says Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. So far, there has been "no definitive proof of a fatal error [in a capital case], but there are some cases out there where it is possible it could be proven." At the top of his group's list of "doubtful" executions is the case of Coleman, who was executed in 1992 for the murder of Wanda McCoy. Perhaps not surprisingly, state authorities are none too eager to cooperate in the effort to reopen the case. Last month, Virginia officials went to court to block any new tests of the semen samples that helped convict Coleman.
The Virginia Supreme Court will certainly not allow the testing to proceed, and I can't see that there are technically any federal grounds that a federal court would be able to use; the case is literally as moot as it could possibly get.
The funny part is how desperate Virginia is to destroy any remaining evidence in the case; they've requested the return of evidence from a lab in California so that it can be destroyed. Given that a more sophisticated test available shortly after the initial trial might have helped prove Coleman's innocence or guilt, I should think that they would want everything hidden away or destroyed, yes. (I do wonder what the state judge meant about the processes "being so different". Aside from the method of execution, Virginia's death penalty process hasn't seen significant change in the past decade. Even if it had, surely in the interests of "justice", the state would want to know with as much certainty as possible that it was convicting the guilty.)
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!