Bacon's Rebellion

Bad Analysis, Legislative Gamesmanship, Misplaced Priorities

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Dick Hall-Sizemore
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5 responses to “Bad Analysis, Legislative Gamesmanship, Misplaced Priorities”

  1. djrippert Avatar
    djrippert

    Unfortunately, Keith Harward is far from alone in being an innocent man imprisoned in Virginia. In 2014 I wrote about Earl Washington’s case on this blog …

    https://www.baconsrebellion.com/the-problem-with-the-death-penalty/

    I agree with your analysis of what went wrong and why with Bill Stanley’s proposed legislation.

    Here’s a thought – decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana and use a small bit of the savings to fund Stanley’s “one writ” process. Everybody wins. Well, everybody except Commonwealth Attorneys … we won’t need so many of them is marijuana possession is decriminalized.

  2. WKJ Avatar
    WKJ

    Wouldn’t these costs have been offset, at least in part, by the savings in prison costs that would have resulted from a release of innocent prisoners? Of course the savings would only accrue over time and would be in a separate department of government.

    1. Dick Hall-Sizemore Avatar
      Dick Hall-Sizemore

      Unfortunately, there would not be any savings. The state currently does not have enough prison beds to house all the offenders who have been convicted of felons and are “eligible” to be housed in prisons. This “overflow” is housed in jails. Therefore, for any wrongly convicted inmate released from prison, there is another inmate waiting to be transferred from jail.

  3. James A. Bacon Avatar
    James A. Bacon

    The aim of Stanley’s bill — to provide more avenues for inmates to prove their innocence in light of new information — is entirely laudable. But the reasons advanced for opposing the bill — the difficulty of retrying old cases, and the fear of frivolous appeals by prisoners with plenty of time on their hands — are not unreasonable. Surely there is some way to reconcile the two positions. Have the two sides sat down and tried to work out a compromise?

    1. Dick Hall-Sizemore Avatar
      Dick Hall-Sizemore

      The bill did address the frivolous appeals issue by limiting the number of petitions to one, unless subsequent petitions were “distinguishable” from previous ones. Of course, a court would have to decide if a petition were
      distinguishable from previous ones. Based on the votes in committee (13-2)and on the floor (38-2), the Senate felt that the reasons for the bill outweighed the arguments against it. The House did not consider it on its merits. There is not much one can do about the passage of time that creates problems for a retrial.

      Stanley introduced the same bill in 2018. It passed the Senate last year, as well, but there was substantially more opposition (15 against). Stanley obviously was more persuasive this year. The House Courts of Justice Committee carried the bill over last year (which is a gentler way of killing it), rather than killing it outright, so there must have been a lot members leaning in favor of the bill, but not quite ready to vote for it. The big difference this year was the fiscal impact statement. There was no fiscal impact statement issued last year. Because there was one this year, the bill got caught up in the budget games between the two houses.

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