by digby
This is horrifying:
In 1992, Kenneth Rouse, an African American man with an IQ between 70 and 80 — “borderline intellectual functioning,” in the clinical parlance — prepared to stand trial in North Carolina on charges that he had robbed, murdered and attempted to rape a white, 63-year-old store clerk.
Rouse’s lawyers questioned the prospective jurors to try to expose any racial or other bias they might have against the defendant. But several years after the all-white jury convicted Rouse and recommended a death sentence, his defense team made a stunning discovery.
One of the jurors, Joseph S. Baynard, admitted that his mother had been robbed, murdered and possibly raped years before. Baynard had not disclosed this history, he said, so that he could sit in judgment of Rouse, whom he called “one step above a moron.” Baynard, who used a racial slur when referring to African Americans, added that he thought black men raped white women for bragging rights.
As claims of juror bias go, the evidence could hardly have been stronger. But Rouse’s final appeal was never heard. Under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Rouse’s lawyers had just one year after his initial state appeal to petition for a last-resort hearing in federal court.
They missed the deadline by a single day.
A federal appeals judge wrote that it was “unconscionable” for her court to reject Rouse’s case because of such a mistake by his court-appointed lawyers. But dozens of lawyers have made the same mistake, and most of their clients, like Rouse, have not been forgiven by the courts for missing the deadline.
An investigation by The Marshall Project shows that since President Bill Clinton signed the one-year statute of limitations into law — enacting a tough-on-crime provision that emerged in the Republicans’ Contract with America — the deadline has been missed at least 80 times in capital cases. Sixteen of those inmates have since been executed — the most recent was on Thursday, when Chadwick Banks was put to death in Florida.
Keep in mind that this was done for the most cynical of reasons. The Republicans had been pimping "law and order" as a way to dogwhistle racism to their followers for a couple of decades and it had been quite successful. Signing laws like this were strategic moves with the purpose of making the Democrats more appealing to conservatives, especially Southerners whom the Democrats believed at the time were essential if they were to maintain a majority.
It was an ugly business, crystallized by then-Governor Bill Clinton's ostentatious rush back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain damaged man named Rickey Ray Rector during the presidential campaign. It was, in my view, the worst thing he ever did. The Democrats eagerly passed crime bills, put hundreds of thousands of cops on the street, escalated the drug war, passed mandatory sentences and welfare reform and enabled rampant gun proliferation all in a quixotic attempt to appeal to those conservative voters who had once been called Reagan Democrats and Boll Weavils.
It was not just an immoral choice. It was a stupid strategy. It didn't work. Clinton eked out victories in two three-way elections but the Reagan Democrats never came home, the South is solidly Republican and the Democrats eventually put together a national coalition without them. Not that the Dems don't have problems, but one thing should be clear by now: there's no margin in adopting the rights racism based policies. You will not be rewarded. Oh, also too: people die.
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