Andrea Johnson
West Virginia University College of Law, Rising 2L
Thursday, May 22, 2008
The Death Penalty

I awoke at 7:00 a.m. to the sounds of a rooster crowing, dogs barking, and an anonymous Mexican man shouting unintelligibly into the warm morning air. This is a normal morning in Guanajuato, and one which I have come to appreciate. After eating breakfast at a small bakery near our quaint hotel, I head down to the University of Guanajuato to begin the day’s classes.

Professor Scully is the first lecturer of the day, and she covers a topic I find very interesting: the death penalty. By reading the case of Medellin v. Texas, we learn of a Mexican national who was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in Texas without ever speaking with a Mexican diplomat. This is not only morally troubling, but also legally troubling because of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, which mandates that any foreign national who is detained by a government that consents to the treaty be notified of his right to contact a diplomat. Medellin was never told of this right and, after exhausting all other options of challenging his conviction, attempted to privately seek enforcement of the Convention. In a surprising political move, President Bush ordered the Texas state courts to uphold the treaty, which had been largely ignored by the U.S. since its adoption in 1963. Usually the President gives state courts a great deal of autonomy. Ultimately, however, the Supreme Court found that the President did not have authority to order state courts to enforce the treaty, and upheld Medellin’s conviction.

Next, we talked generally about the death penalty in the United States, which exists in 40 jurisdictions. Until 2002, the death penalty was applied to the mentally retarded and those that lacked adequate counsel. Until 2005, it was applied to juveniles. Changes to the death penalty have largely been due to media attention highlighting its problems and injustices, but many problems still exist. For example, racism in the criminal justice system results in a disproportionate amount of blacks sentenced to death. Additionally, according to McClesky v. Kemp, the odds of the death penalty being imposed is 4.3 times greater when a white is killed as opposed to a black. Also, there is the constant worry of executing a person who is actually innocent. Due to the number of prisoners on death row that have been exonerated using DNA evidence, a moratorium movement has started in several states. In some states, the number of inmates who have been exonerated has been as high as 50% of those currently on death row in that state. This reinforces that the rate of errors in the criminal justice system certainly needs to be considered, especially by proponents of the death penalty.

Later, we had an interesting discussion on what can be done to reduce some of the problems with the death penalty. My answer: abolish it.