Tennessee Death Penalty Fact Sheet
Arbitrary and Unfair Proceedings
"Despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake."
-U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun, February 22, 1994
The death penalty in the United States is arbitrary and unfair because:
- Few death row inmates could afford to hire attorneys at the time of their trials. Poor people are subjected to convictions and death sentences that more affluent, but equally or more culpable people, would not have received.
- 90% of Tennessee???s death row could not afford to hire their own attorneys at the time of their trials.
- Prosecutors seek the death penalty far more frequently when the victim of the homicide is white than when the victim is black or of another ethic origin.
- A person is three times more likely to receive the death penalty if the victim is white.
- Co-defendants charged with committing the same crime often receive different punishments, where one defendant may receive a death sentence while another receives limited prison time. Steve Henley, E.J. Harbison, and Don Johnson are some Tennessee death penalty cases where this has occurred.
- Individual prosecutors make their own decisions about when to seek a death sentence, so that where the crime has been committed often determines the punishment.
- Shelby County in Tennessee accounts for nearly 39% of Tennessee???s entire death row. 47 of the 95 counties in Tennessee have never sentenced anyone to death.
- Of the 151 Tennessee death sentences (as of 2001) reviewed on appeal since 1977, half were overturned, primarily because of trial errors or inadequate representation (Tennessean July 2001)
- Olen Hutchinson was sentenced to death in 1991 for his involvement in a murder conspiracy in East Tennessee, though he was neither present at nor even in the same county as the crime. His accuser, Ricky Miller, was a conspirator who was present and involved in the murder itself. Miller became the state???s chief witness despite his extensive criminal record and was released after spending only two years in the county jail.
- Since 1977, 25% of the black men sentenced to death in Tennessee have had all white juries and, in more than half of those cases, the victim was also white. (Tennessean July 2001)
- The National Law Journal, after a study of death penalty representation in the South, concluded that capital trials are "more like a random flip of the coin than a delicate balancing of scales," because the defense attorney is "too often???ill-trained, unprepared (and) grossly underpaid." (M.Coyle, etc al., Fatal Defense: Trial and Error in the Nation???s Death Belt, Nat???l. L.J., June 11, 1990)
