Resistance to Death Penalty Building Across U.S.

Chicago Tribune

About once a week, a convicted murderer is put to death in a state penitentiary, most often in Texas, where all but one of this year's 12 executions have occurred.

But around the U.S., capital punishment is under siege. Since the first of the year, individual states have acted on long festering questions about the equity of capital punishment and made bold moves aimed at repealing the death penalty, slowing the practice or temporarily halting it because of rising costs.

The Nebraska Legislature came within one vote last month of repealing its death penalty law. The new governor of Maryland called for the outright repeal of capital punishment. Most of Georgia's 72 capital cases have been stopped because the state's public defender system has run out of money. New Jersey lawmakers are drafting a bill to repeal that state's death penalty. And last month the governor of Virginia, a state whose 96 executions since 1976 are exceeded only by Texas, vetoed five bills that would have expanded the use of capital punishment.

"I do not believe that further expansion of the death penalty is necessary to protect human life or provide for public safety needs," said Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine, an opponent of capital punishment.

Skepticism toward and resistance to the death penalty has been building since the late 1990s, after investigations uncovered a troubling number of wrongful convictions. That and existing moral objections to capital punishment prompted some states, led in 2000 by Illinois and then-Gov. George Ryan, to place a moratorium on executions, which have dropped from a yearly high of 98 in 1999 to 53 in 2006.

Recent developments in states have been influenced by pragmatism, with much of it rooted in concerns over the costs of lengthy appeals, which in some cases exceed two decades. Six pending appeals of death penalty cases in Ohio, for instance, where 191 people are on Death Row, include cases that go back to 1984.

Pointing to multimillion dollar costs from appeals, Frank Zimring, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law said: "People are starting to talk about cost and notice the marginality of the death penalty."

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley noted that 56 people have been sentenced to death in his state since 1978, and taxpayers have spent about $22.4 million beyond the cost of imprisonment on appeal litigation.

O'Malley, a Democrat, said in February that if the state were to replace the death penalty with life without parole, "that $22.4 million could pay for 500 additional police officers or provide drug treatment for 10,000 of our addicted neighbors. Unlike the death penalty, these are investments that save lives and prevent violent crime."

There are about 3,350 convicts on Death Row, and more than one-third of them - 1,450 - reside in penal institutions in California (660), Florida (397) and Texas (393).

The legal system's delivery of death sentences has dramatically slowed. During the 1990s U.S. courts would customarily issue about 300 death sentences annually. Those numbers have plummeted in the last seven years, to 128 in 2005 and a tally last year of 102, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group that lobbies against capital punishment.

Efforts to repeal or otherwise rethink the death penalty do not suggest that the days of capital punishment in the U.S. are necessarily numbered. (Thirty-seven states have the death penalty; 12 do not and New York's was declared unconstitutional in 2004.) While the Montana Senate approved the abolition of the death penalty this year, a House committee defeated the measure. In New Mexico, the House approved a repeal but a Senate committee said no. In Maryland, a legislative committee rejected O'Malley's plea to replace the death penalty with life without parole.

Furthermore, public opinion polls consistently show majority support for the death penalty. Fifty-six percent of Wisconsin voters last fall approved an advisory referendum to re-impose the death penalty in the state, which recorded its last execution more than 150 years ago.

"I don't think the country is about to get rid of the death penalty," observed Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "But overall, the trend shows some rethinking and hesitance."

"Because of flaws in the system and economics, everything is now being given a fresh look," Dieter said.

Support for life imprisonment without the prospect of parole has been growing, polls show, and that, coupled with questions about the application of capital punishment and concerns about mounting costs, have undermined political support for the death penalty.

Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland is an ordained minister and former prison psychologist who worked on Ohio's Death Row. Strickland, a Democrat, has long been an advocate of the death penalty but now defines himself as a "supporter with certain reservations."

"I used to think before I worked in prisons that although innocent people could be convicted that it was very highly unlikely that someone (innocent) would be on Death Row," said Strickland, who delayed the scheduled executions of three inmates shortly after taking office in January.

"There is convincing evidence that individuals have been wrongly convicted," he said.

One of Strickland's predecessors, Michael DiSalle, who served as Ohio's governor from 1959 to 1963, personally investigated the cases of inmates on Ohio's Death Row while he was governor.

"The possibility of an irrevocable error was so vivid to me that on several occasions I made last-minute visits to the grim, antiquated Ohio State Penitentiary, not far from downtown Columbus, across the street from the casket factory, for a final interview with the condemned man," DiSalle wrote in his 1965 book "The Power of Life or Death."

Eleven states have placed moratoriums on executions because of questions about the humanity of the lethal injection process, the most popular form of execution. Nebraska, which is the only state to mandate use of the electric chair, may revisit the death penalty issue later this spring, with consideration of a bill allowing for life imprisonment without parole, providing the inmate can be imprisoned without endangering other inmates.

"I don't know what's going to happen," said Nebraska state Sen. Ernie Chambers, a longtime opponent of the capital punishment. "But there's a lot less fear on the part of senators to consider abolishing the death penalty."

http://www.beliefnet.com/story/215/story_21559.html

Report: Politics a factor in death penalty appeals

Associated Press

CINCINNATI — The fate of death penalty defendants before a federal appeals court often depends on the political party of the president who appointed the judges, a newspaper study published Sunday found.

Judges on the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals appointed by Republican presidents voted to deny the appeals 85 percent of the time, while those appointed by Democrats voted to support at least part of the appeals 75 percent of the time, The Cincinnati Enquirer reported.

The newspaper examined the 85 death penalty cases considered between January 2000 and April 7, 2007. The court decides death penalty appeals from Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.

The first stop for an inmate at the 6th Circuit is before a randomly selected three-judge panel. If the inmate loses that round, he or she can ask the full Circuit to consider the ruling. The court has 14 active judges and two semi-retired senior judges.

The full court rarely disagrees with the three-judge panels and the U.S. Supreme Court hears few death penalty cases.
Nine of the judges were appointed by Republican presidents and seven were appointed by Democrats.

Appointees of Democrat Jimmy Carter vote, at least in part, in the inmate’s favor 89 percent of the time; Republican Ronald Reagan’s appointees voted in favor in 25 percent of cases; Republican George H.W. Bush’s appointees, 7 percent; Democrat Bill Clinton’s appointees, 70 percent; and appointees of Republican President Bush 13 percent, the Enquirer found.

“That is very stark,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group that’s critical of the death penalty. “It makes blind justice look like part of the political system.”

The study found that a three-judge panel with a liberal majority gives an inmate a much greater chance of avoiding an execution than going before one with a conservative majority.

“When I look at a lineup of a panel in this kind of case, you can almost go to the bank on what the result is going to be,” said Nathaniel Jones, a retired 6th Circuit member appointed by Carter.

Lawyers and court-watchers blame the ideological split on the nominating process, in which the president’s pick often goes through a grilling by the Senate Judiciary Committee on hot-button issues such as the death penalty and abortion, then faces a confirmation vote by the full Senate.

“The most important factor is the president who appoints federal judges,” Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, a Republican, said. “That’s why, when there is a Supreme Court nominee, there is blood in the streets of Washington.”

http://www.chroniclet.com/2007/04/16/report-politics-a-factor-in-death-penalty-appeals/

Standard for excluding jurors: Argument 4/17/07
Uttecht v. Brown (06-413)

A single jury panel member named Richard Deal, excluded from serving in a gruesome murder case that went to trial 14 years ago in Washington State, is at the center of a potentially historic case on jury selection in death penalty cases due for argument at 1 p.m. Tuesday. The case of Uttecht v. Brown (06-413) puts before the Court a mixture of issues about federal court authority to review jury selection in state criminal courts, about the ease with which judges may bar jurors with reservations about the death penalty, and about how to apply a key Supreme Court precedent on capital trials (Wainwright v. Witt, 1985). It also involves the ongoing conflict between the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit Court over how rigorously to read the habeas-curbing provisions of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.

Richard Deal was a potential juror in the 1993 trial of Cal Coburn Brown on charges of raping and torturing a woman he held captive for two days in a Spokane motel, before killing her by stabbing her repeatedly and leaving her to bleed to death in the trunk of a parked car. During selection of jurors, Deal said on a questionnaire and repeated on the stand that he could impose a death sentence for someone who had killed "and would kill again." Despite repeated questioning by both sides about his views on capital punishment, his answers did not satisfy prosecutors, and they sought to have him excluded for cause. The judge found Deal's responses equivocal, and removed him from the panel as "impaired." The jury that was chosen convicted Brown and he was sentenced to death.

After failing in challenges in state courts, Brown pursued a habeas challenge in federal court, but lost in District Court. The Ninth Circuit, however, overturned his sentence, concluding that the exclusion of Richard Deal from the jury was not a reasonable application of Supreme Court precedent on the standards for jury selection in capital cases. The state courts had never explicitly found that Deal would have been unable to follow the trial judge's instructions on considering a death sentence, the Circuit Court said. It added that Deal's statements were clear enough that there was no need for federal courts to presume that the trial judge's exclusion of the juror was correct.

Washington State prison officials took the case on to the Supreme Court, which granted review on Jan. 12. At Tuesday afternoon's one-hour hearing, the state officials will be represented by John J. Samson, assistant state attorney general. Joining him on that side of the case will be Deputy Solicitor General Michael R. Dreeben; the U.S. government is in the case as an amicus to support the state as well as to defend jury selection procedures in federal capital cases. Representing Cal Coburn Brown will be a Seattle sole practitioner, Susanne Lee Elliott.

Because the case reaches the Supreme Court as a federal habeas case, much of the debate in the case centers on how much authority federal courts have to second-guess trial judges' decisions about when to exclude a potential juror because of his or her views about capital punishment. The state of Washington, the federal government, and 23 other states as amici argue that AEDPA's emphasis on the need to presume the correctness of state court decisions under review in federal habeas is especially necessary when it comes to jury selection and exclusion.

So much depends upon credibility as a factor in including or barring a juror, that side argues, that the trial judge is in the best position to make judgments about how that juror would react during the trial and decision on the verdict. As the Solicitor General's government brief puts it: "Determinations of juror bias turn on an assessment of the juror's credibility, and the trial court is uniquely positioned to assess the juror's credibility by viewing the juror's demeanor and hearing the juror's testimony." Thus, applying the standard of the Witt decision -- a juror may be excluded from a capital jury if his or her views "would prevent or substantially impair the performance of his duties...in accordance with his instructions and his oath" -- the challengers to the Ninth Circuit argue that it should have deferred to the trial judge's assessment of what potential juror Deal had said about the death penalty.

A related issue that the states emphasize is whether the Witt standard can only be met if the trial judge makes explicit findings, and enters them on the record, as to why an excluded juror was considered impaired. The states contend that judges should be allowed to make that judgment based upon "implicit" findings not spelled out, or "inferences" from what is in the record. The Ninth Circuit in this case faulted the trial judge for never finding explicitly that juror Deal would not be able to perform his duty. The other states as amici argue that "if AEDPA's presumption of correctness is inapplicable to implicit findings, state trial courts will deem it necessary to articulate all factual findings on each discrete legal issue that arises in the course of a case, and their ability to conduct criminal trials efficiently will be compromised."

The Washington State brief argues that the "presumption of correctness" required by federal habeas law "is not limited to express findings of the trial court. The presumption applies to the express and implicit findings of the state trial and appellate courts." Thus, the state said, even if the words a juror uses and are recorded in a transcript are clear, the demeanor that a juror exhibits may persuade a trial judge that the juror's views, however stated, lead to a conclusion of impairment.

The brief for Coburn argues that the trial judge was wrong (and the state courts were wrong in upholding the trial judge) in concluding that juror Deal had to be barred because he misunderstood the law of capital punishment in Washington State. The trial court, Coburn's brief says, dismissed Deal after prosecutors objected that Deal had not overcome the idea that a death sentence could be imposed only if there is proof that the murderer would kill again if not executed. The state Supreme Court upheld the exclusion, saying that this kind of proof is not requried as a matter of state law.

Coburn's brief contends that the issue on whether a juror is impaired should not turn on whether he or she understands the law: "A prospective juror's confusion about the law during voir dire is simply not a basis for concluding that his views about the death penalty would substantially impair his ability to ollow the law or honor his oath. Few jurors could pass a quiz about the law during voir dire." In juror Deal's case, the brief asserts, he was only stating his view that the prospect of further killing was a factor that would be important to him in deciding the death sentence issue.

That point is echoed in the amici briefs supporting Coburn. The American Civil Liberties Union urges the Court to make it clear that jurors' concerns about future dangerousness should be allowed as a factor in influencing their decision on capital punishment. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers adds that "the liberal dismissal of jurors who express reservations about capital punishment in general, or a reluctance to impose it except in restricted circumstances, skews capital juries toward death and undermines the representative nature of the jury and, thereby, public confidence in the capital sentencing process."

The Court is expected to decide the case before recessing for the summer.

Executed in US may be awake as they suffocate

Associated Press, April 24, 2007

The drugs used to execute prisoners in the United States sometimes fail to work as planned, causing slow and painful deaths that probably violate constitutional bans on cruel and unusual punishment, a new medical review of dozens of executions concludes.

Even when administered properly, the three-drug lethal injection method appears to have caused some inmates to suffocate while they were conscious and unable to move, instead of having their hearts stopped while they were sedated, scientists said in a report published Monday by the online journal PLoS Medicine.

No scientific groups have ever validated that lethal injection is humane, the authors write. Medical ethics bar doctors and other health professionals from taking part in executions.

The study concluded that the typical "one-size-fits-all" doses of anesthetic do not take into account an inmate's weight and other key factors. Some inmates got too little, and in some cases, the anesthetic wore off before the execution was complete, the authors found.

"You wouldn't be able to use this protocol to kill a pig at the University of Miami" without more proof that it worked as intended, said Teresa Zimmers, a biologist there who led the study.

The journal's editors call for abolishing the death penalty, writing: "There is no humane way of forcibly killing someone."

Lethal injection has been adopted by 37 states as a cheaper and more humane alternative to electrocution, gas chambers and other execution methods.

But 11 states have suspended its use after opponents alleged it is ineffective and cruel. The issue came to a head last year in California, when a federal judge ordered that doctors assist in killing Michael Morales, convicted of raping and murdering a teenage girl. Doctors refused, and legal arguments continue in the case.

More than 2,000 executions

In 2005 alone, at least 2,148 people have been killed by lethal injection in 22 countries, especially China, where fleets of mobile execution vans are used, the editors write, citing Amnesty International figures. Of the 53 executions in the United States in 2006, all but one were by lethal injection.

The new review was written by many of the same authors who touched off controversy when they published a 2005 report suggesting that many inmates were conscious and possibly suffering when the last of the drugs was given.

That report was criticized for its methodology, which relied on blood samples taken from prisoners hours after executions.

The new paper looked at the executions of 40 prisoners in North Carolina since 1984 and about a dozen in California, plus incomplete information from Florida and Virginia. The authors analyzed details such as the dose the inmates received, their weight and the time they needed to die.

Most states use three drugs -- thiopental, an anesthetic; pancuronium bromide, a nerve blocker and muscle paralyzer; and potassium chloride, a drug to stop the heart. Each is supposed to be capable of killing all by itself, but if not, the anesthetic is supposed to render the inmate unconscious while the other drugs do the job.

In 33 North Carolina executions, the average death time was 10 to 14 minutes, depending on the combination of drugs used, the authors report. Calculating each inmate's actual dose, based on his or her weight, they concluded that some did not receive enough.

"The person would feel either asphyxiation or the burning sensation associated with the potassium," said Dr. Leonidas Koniaris, a surgeon and co-author at the University of Miami. "The potassium would cause extreme discomfort, something like being put on fire."

Even the final drug did not always prove fatal as intended. At least one California inmate required a 2nd dose, and the California warden has said additional doses were used in 2 other executions, the study reports.

Death penalty proponents complained the report's conclusions were based on scant scientific evidence.

"It's more like political science than medical science," said Mike Rushford, president of Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento.

Steve Stewart, prosecuting attorney in Clark County, Indiana, where an execution is scheduled for May 4, said the simple solution seemed to be to give a higher dose of the anesthetic, which probably would not satisfy opponents who see all methods as barbaric.

"It doesn't matter a whole lot to me that someone may have felt some pain before they were administered poison as a method of execution," he said.

Dr. Mark Heath, an anesthesiologist at Columbia University Medical Center who has studied lethal injection cases, took issue with some of the paper's conclusions, but said it generally showed that concerns about lethal injection in its current form "are well-justified."

Editors said they sent the manuscript to 3 independent medical experts for review -- an anesthesiologist, a forensic pathologist and someone in charge of a critical care unit, plus a lawyer.

"We were satisfied" with the science, said Dr. Virginia Barbour, a British physician who is managing editor of the journal, published by the nonprofit group Public Library of Science. "The difficulty of a paper like this is that there is very poor evidence for all the kinds of protocols used" in lethal injections, but the authors did a good job analyzing what there is, she said.
Source: Associated Press

Innocent and Executed

New NCADP report reveals four examples of innocent men executed in Texas, Missouri
For years, abolitionists have worked with the knowledge that many people - at least 123, at last count - have been sentenced to death, only to be exonerated later after evidence of their innocence emerged. And abolitionists long have suspected that in addition to these exonerations, other innocent people actually have been put to death. A new NCADP report, Innocent and Executed: Four Chapters in the Life of America's Death Penalty, details the cases of four men in Texas and Missouri who were demonstrably if not certainly innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted, sentenced to death and executed.

Download the Report Here or go to the new Innocent and Executed website for even more information.

Editorial: Death no more
Dallas Morning News

Ernest Ray Willis set a fire that killed two women in Pecos County . So said Texas prosecutors who obtained a conviction in 1987 and sent Mr. Willis to death row. But it wasn't true.

Seventeen years later, a federal judge overturned the conviction, finding that prosecutors had drugged Mr. Willis with powerful anti-psychotic medication during his trial and then used his glazed appearance to characterize him as "cold-hearted." They also suppressed evidence and introduced neither physical proof nor eyewitnesses in the trial – and his court-appointed lawyers mounted a lousy defense. Besides, another death-row inmate confessed to the killings.

The state dropped all charges. Ernest Ray Willis emerged from prison a pauper. But he was lucky: He had his life. Not so Carlos De Luna, who was executed in 1989 for the stabbing death of a single mother who worked at a gas station. For years, another man with a history of violent crimes bragged that he had committed the crime. The case against Mr. De Luna, in many eyes, does not stand up to closer examination.

There are signs he was innocent. We don't know for sure, but we do know that if the state made a mistake, nothing can rectify it.

And that uncomfortable truth has led this editorial board to re-examine its century-old stance on the death penalty. This board has lost confidence that the state of Texas can guarantee that every inmate it executes is truly guilty of murder. We do not believe that any legal system devised by inherently flawed human beings can determine with moral certainty the guilt of every defendant convicted of murder.

That is why we believe the state of Texas should abandon the death penalty – because we cannot reconcile the fact that it is both imperfect and irreversible.

Flaws in the capital criminal justice system have troubled us for some time. We have editorialized in favor of clearer instructions to juries, better counsel for defendants, the overhaul of forensic labs and restrictions on the execution of certain classes of defendant. We have urged lawmakers to at least put in place a moratorium, as other states have, to closely examine the system.

And yet, despite tightening judicial restrictions and growing concern, the exonerations keep coming, and the doubts keep piling up without any reaction from Austin .

From our vantage point in Dallas County , the possibility of tragic, fatal error in the death chamber appears undeniable. We have seen a parade of 13 men walk out of the prison system after years – even decades – of imprisonment for crimes they didn't commit. Though not death penalty cases, these examples – including an exoneration just last week – reveal how shaky investigative techniques and reliance on eyewitnesses can derail the lives of the innocent.

The Tulia and the fake-drug scandals have also eroded public confidence in the justice system. These travesties illustrate how greed and bigotry can poison the process.

It's hard to believe that such pervasive human failings have never resulted in the death of an innocent man.

In 2001, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said, "If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed."

Some death penalty supporters acknowledge that innocents may have been and may yet be executed, but they argue that serving the greater good is worth risking that unfortunate outcome. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia argues that the Byzantine appeals process effectively sifts innocent convicts from the great mass of guilty, and killing the small number who fall through is a risk he's willing to live with. According to polls, most Texans are, too. But this editorial board is not.

Justice Scalia calls these innocents "an insignificant minimum." But that minimum is not insignificant to the unjustly convicted death-row inmate. It is not insignificant to his or her family. This marks a transgression against the Western moral tradition, which establishes both the value of the individual and the wrongness of making an innocent suffer for the supposed good of the whole. Shedding innocent blood has been a scandal since Cain slew Abel – a crime for which, the Bible says, God spared the murderer, who remained under harsh judgment.

This newspaper's death penalty position is based not on sympathy for vile murderers – who, most agree, deserve to die for their crimes – but rather in the conviction that not even the just dispatch of 10, 100, or 1,000 of these wretches can remove the stain of innocent blood from our common moral fabric.

This is especially true given that our society can be adequately guarded from killers using bloodless means. In 2005, the Legislature gave juries the option of sentencing killers to life without parole.

The state holds in its hands the power of life and death. It is an awesome power, one that citizens of a democracy must approach in fear and trembling, and in full knowledge that the state's justice system, like everything humanity touches, is fated to fall short of perfection. If we are doomed to err in matters of life and death, it is far better to err on the side of caution. It is far better to err on the side of life. The state cannot impose death – an irrevocable sentence – with absolute certainty in all cases. Therefore the state should not impose it at all.

Judge frees Oklahoma man facing execution Police misconduct tainted the case against a convict who did 22 years.

By Henry Weinstein, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer, May 12, 2007

A judge in Oklahoma City on Friday dismissed murder charges against a man who was sentenced to death three times in the 1982 slaying of a teenager, convictions that were based largely on testimony from a police department chemist who was fired for fraud and misconduct in 2001.

Oklahoma District Court Judge Twyla Mason Gray ruled that the case against Curtis E. McCarty was tainted by the actions of former Oklahoma City police chemist Joyce Gilchrist, whose work has been called into question in a host of other death penalty cases.

Citing the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Arizona vs. Youngblood, Gray said she was dismissing the charges because Gilchrist had acted in "bad faith," and "most likely did destroy or intentionally lose" hair that was crucial evidence in McCarty's trial in the 1982 stabbing and strangling of Pamela Kaye Willis.

According to several people at Friday's hearing, Gray said she still thought that McCarty may have been involved in the murder but that the law required her to throw the case out.

Innocence Project attorney Colin Starger, who has represented McCarty since 2003, said, "Every piece of evidence in this case, including evidence [that] was used improperly to secure convictions, now shows Curtis McCarty's innocence."

Free after nearly 22 years behind bars, McCarty said Friday that he had been out for "only a few hours" and had not "had time to digest" everything that occurred: "I am happy not just for myself but for my family and all the people who worked so hard" for his release.

"But for the Innocence Project, Judge Gray would not have done what she did today. I don't think she had cause to take a dig at me, but I join her in her condemnation of Gilchrist," McCarty said in an interview.

McCarty was first convicted of the murder and sentenced to death in 1986. The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals overturned the verdicts, saying that Dist. Atty. Robert H. Macy Sr. had acted deplorably during the trial, and that Gilchrist had omitted key information from her forensic reports.

McCarty was convicted and sentenced to death again in 1989. That conviction was upheld on appeal but the death sentence was reversed. A new penalty phase trial was conducted in 1996, and McCarty was sentenced to death a third time.

Five years later, serious questions surfaced about Gilchrist's conduct in many cases, including that of Jeffrey T. Pierce. In May 2001, Pierce was freed from an Oklahoma prison after serving 15 years for a rape that DNA tests ultimately showed he did not commit.

A federal appeals court overturned the death sentence of a man convicted of rape and murder in August 2001, concluding that jurors might have relied on Gilchrist's testimony.

Gilchrist was fired in September 2001 for allegedly performing shoddy work and giving false or misleading testimony, including 23 cases in which she helped send men to death row. Eleven of those defendants have been executed, according to the Innocence Project.

State and federal investigations of Gilchrist's work in more than 1,100 cases unearthed more problems, including her performance in McCarty's case.

Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, said McCarty's was "one of the worst examples of law enforcement misconduct" in his experience.

On Friday, Oklahoma County Dist. Atty. David Prater said he thought Gray's dismissal of charges against McCarty "was the correct decision," even though he is not convinced that McCarty is innocent.

"Because of the checks and balances in the justice system, the judge has the duty to make sure a person is afforded a fair trial…. With her ruling that potentially exculpatory evidence had been destroyed by Gilchrist, Judge Gray said he could never get a fair trial," Prater said.

The Times could not reach Gilchrist on Friday.