American Bar Association (ABA) Recommends Kentucky Suspend Death Penalty To Fix Flaws.

Kentucky should suspend death penalty, ABA panel recommends
Written by Andrew Wolfson

An American Bar Assocation panel has recommended that the death penalty be temporarily suspended in Kentucky until it adopts safeguards to prevent the execution of the innocent.

In a 520-page report issued Wednesday, a team of lawyers and retired judges who studied the state’s death penalty laws and procedures for two years found that they do not “sufficiently protect the innocent, convict the guilty and ensure the fair and efficient enforcement of criminal law.”

The report, by a six-member team, found that Kentucky has made “substantial strides” in providing an adequate defense for capital defendants, but that several grave weakness remain. Those include include the failure of police departments to follow nationally recommened eyewitness identification procedures; the failure to retain evidence for subsequent DNA testing; and the absence of a system for ensuring that the state’s 57 commonwealth’s attorneys apply the death penalty in an “even, non-discriminatory manner.”

The report also found that at least 10 of the 78 people sentenced to death in Kentucky since capital punishment was reintroduced in the state in 1976 were represented by defense counsel who were subsequently disbarred, and that 52 of them — or nearly 60 percent — had their sentences reversed on appeal or were granted clemency.

The report recommends more than two dozen reforms and says that halting executions would give all three branches of government the opportunity to address and rectify problems identified in the report.

Terry Sebastian, a spokesman for Gov. Steve Beshear, said the governor’s office would “carefully review” the report but noted that Franklin Circuit Court Judge Phillip Shepherd issued a temporary ban on executions while he decides if the state’s lethal injection protocol is adequate.