Remarks Of Senator Patrick Leahy News Conference On Introduction Of The Bipartisan Innocence Protection Act

June 07, 2000

A scant four months ago, when we first introduced this package of death penalty reforms, few would have predicted that this issue would reach Congress’s front burner this session, let alone that reform legislation had any chance of actual passage.

Today, hearings are imminent in both the Senate and the House, governors, senators and presidential candidates are being asked about it, cover stories and editorials are focusing squarely on this problem, pundits from the left and the right are endorsing these reforms. For this boost of momentum for this worthy cause, those joining me here today deserve a world of credit.

This bill will only pass through bipartisan effort, and Senator Gordon Smith, Senator Susan Collins and Senator Jim Jeffords have courageously stepped forward to help push this down the aisle to a Senate vote from their side of the Senate Chamber with Senator Feingold, Senator Levin, Senator Moynihan, Senator Akaka, Senator Bob Kerrey, Senator Wellstone and I pushing from our side. An impressive bipartisan coalition is also actively at work in the House.

Our criminal justice system is not working as it should when innocent people are convicted of serious crimes and then spend decades or even reach the end of death row before the mistakes, if ever, are caught. It is not working when those imprisoned for capital and other serious crimes cannot use existing evidence for DNA tests that could prove their innocence.

It is not working when dozing, drunken or disbarred defense lawyers are representing those facing the death sentence. It is not working when innocent people are rotting in prison, taking the places of murderers and rapists who are still walking the streets. It is not working when it falls to accidents, good luck or college students to catch some of these mistakes and close calls on death row.

I came to the Senate after working for several years as a prosecutor. The saddest fact of all, to me, is that the society facing this crisis is not a medieval one. Our 21st Century America is the wealthiest, most technically advanced and most powerful nation on earth.

Fixing this broken system will take cooperative efforts by the states, and our bill is a catalyst for the reforms that have to happen in our state capitals. We have come together to accelerate that process. We believe these reforms are the least that we can do protect the innocent.

Much has been written about the DNA reforms in our bill. Access to these highly accurate tests helps convict the guilty and exonerate the innocent. But let us be clear: DNA tests are one part of the solution, but more than that they are a window on the larger problems in the system, like inadequate legal counsel in many of these cases.

We in Congress can never guarantee that the innocent will not be convicted. But we have a responsibility, at a minimum, to ensure that when people in this country are on trial for their lives, they will be defended by lawyers who meet reasonable minimum standards of competence and who have sufficient resources to investigate the facts and prepare thoroughly for trial.

That goal can be achieved by cooperation between the states and the federal government whereby the money we give the states to fund their criminal justice systems is conditioned on their meeting a floor of minimum standards, and by leaving the states free to improve on those standards if they want to.

That is what this bill seeks to achieve. It is a carefully crafted package of criminal justice reforms designed to protect the innocent and to ensure that if the death penalty is imposed, it is the result of informed and reasoned deliberation, not politics, luck, bias or guesswork.

Time is a luxury that the innocent people in our prisons cannot afford. There can be no longer be any question that our capital punishment system is in crisis. The Innocence Protection Act is the absolute minimum we must do to catch these mistakes and to restore the public’s confidence in our criminal justice system.

When I took on an effort to ban the use of anti-personnel landmines, I found that the public readily understood that civilized societies cannot accept use of a weapon that indiscriminately kills the innocent. I believe that sense of decency and common sense is going to prevail in this crisis, too.