Kindred Spirits funds

Many of us in TCADP know of the fine work of KINDRED SPIRITS. Please give this request your careful consideration.
Thank you.

Urgent Appeal from Kindred Spirits!

Kindred Spirits provides friendship and personal support to prisoners in Florida under sentence of death. KS is an all volunteer organization established in 1991 and it is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Each quarter Kindred Spirits makes a small deposit in the accounts of many death row prisoners, most of whom have no family or financial help of any kind. This money is used to buy such things as shoes, toothpaste, writing paper, thermal underwear in winter, or a snack from the canteen. Kindred Spirits also sends letters, stamps, and birthday cards to prisoners. All of this is done through volunteers with virtually no administrative costs. Until now, the organization has been funded through donations and also a small church grant. These monies are running out and there is an urgent need for donations of any size before the next quartrly contributions to prisoner accounts is made in mid-April. Please help with any amount by sending a check to: Audrey Rivers, Kindred Spirits Charitable Trust, 820 McGuire Avenue, Tallahassee, Florida 32303.

Nancy Smith Fichter and the board of the TCADP

CADP Chair-Elect, Walter Moore to speak

TCADP Chair-Elect, Walter Moore, is the final speaker in a four-week series on Religion in Public Life, sponsored by Trinity United Methodist Church. The series is offered each Spring and is referred to as The Academy.
Walter Moore will speak on the death penalty; his lecture is scheduled for 6:30 PM- 7:30 PM, May 3. The other dates have been changed as well (Bob Spivey will speak April 19, Leo Sandon April 26, and Bill Swain May 10.)

[Other speakers/ topics : Bob Spivey, Introduction; Leo Sandon, Church and State; Bill Swain, Abortion.]

Trinity United Methodist Church is at the Corner of Park and Duval Streets, Tallahassee, Florida.

Leo Sandon on lethal injection debate

The debate lives

By Leo Sandon
The Tallahassee Democrat
Sunday, March 5, 2006

Challenges to the use of lethal injection have brought the issue of capital punishment back into national focus, at least indirectly. And among the most persistent participants in the conversation are members of faith communities.

On Feb. 21 California postponed the execution of Michael A. Mores to examine the state’s lethal-injection procedures. Similar execution procedures are followed in 35 of the 36 states that allow the death penalty. California acted after determining that it could not comply with a federal judge’s order to alter its methods.

Most of the states use three chemicals administered intravenously and in sequence by machines. Typically penitentiary personnel insert the three lines into the prisoner.

The broad question that has emerged is whether the procedure might cause enough pain to violate the Eighth ! Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. The federal judge, Jeremy Fogel, was concerned with specific evidence that California’s procedure was frequently poorly administered and extremely painful.

Lawyers in several states are bringing legal challenges to the procedure. Look for many more in the wake of the California action. One from Florida, Hill v. Crosby, apparently is scheduled to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court in April, but it isn’t really a challenge to the merits of lethal injection.

Don’t look for a ruling that lethal injection is unconstitutional. And don’t look for this particular discussion to change minds about the use of the death penalty itself.

Still, American public opinion apparently is shifting. Support for the death penalty is declining. A majority, 64 percent, still favor it if the question is simply whether they support the death penalty. Fewer than a majority favor it, however, if the question is a! choice between the death penalty and life imprisonment without parole .

Last year U.S. Catholic bishops, active opponents of capital punishment for more than 25 years, launched a new campaign to end the practice. Evangelicals such as Jimmy Carter and Jim Wallis, a leader whose positions on social ethics tend to be progressive, agree with the bishops. Most mainline denominations have adopted statements opposing the death penalty.

To be sure, faith communities are not of one mind, and many of those who are in the pews do not follow their denominational leaders. The Southern Baptist Convention, the largest U.S. Protestant denomination, supports capital punishment. And there is a gap between Catholic and mainline Protestant leaders and many in their membership.

Most all of Florida’s modern governors, for instance, have been religiously affiliated, but only the late LeRoy Collins opposed capital punishment. Most members of the Florida Legislature are members of faith communities, but you couldn’t muster a dozen legislators’ votes against the death penalty (unless, perhaps, it was a secret ballot).

Yet the majority participating in the candle-lighting vigil in front of the Governor’s Mansion at precisely the time Death Row inmates are executed are active members of faith communities and are religiously motivated. And most (but not all) of those who meet to witness in the Capitol rotunda at high noon on the first workday after each execution are there out of religious commitment, be they Quakers, Catholics, Jews or others.

They show up because they agree with St. Augustine that the state should be in the justice business, not the vengeance business.

Leo Sandon is professor emeritus of religion and American studies at Florida State.

More on the Ballard case and its impact

Errors at trial

Overturning Florida’s wrongful convictions

Daytona Beach News Journal editorial
Tuesday, February 28, 2006

After years of controversy, Florida lawmakers finally seem to understand the importance of DNA testing in previously closed criminal cases. To date, 25 people have walked free — 22 of them from death row — because DNA tests proved their innocence.

The evidence is so compelling that the Legislature has extended the deadline for DNA testing twice, and could abolish it during next month’s session. They’re moving in the right direction, putting justice over politics.

But not every case has DNA. And some of those convictions are troubling. Such was the case with John Robert Ballard, a 37-year-old convicted of two murders and sentenced to death in 1999.

Ballard’s conviction rested mostly on a few hairs and a fingerprint found in a Collier County apartment shared by Jennifer Jones, and Willy Ray Patin, Jr. The evidence established that Ballard was in the apartment — but that was no surprise, since Ballard was friends with the couple and often in their home. Testimony showed that another man had shot at Jones’ and Patin’s apartment the week before the couple was murdered. But instead of pursuing that man, prosecutors persuaded a jury to convict Ballard.

Telling him he’d forfeited his right to live, Circuit Judge Lauren Miller sentenced Ballard to death. Still, he maintained his innocence.

Nearly six years later, the Florida Supreme Court has ordered Ballard to be freed. The evidence against him was too slim, proving only that he was in the apartment at some time, the court said.

Ballard wasn’t the only one to suffer because of the state’s decision to prosecute him. News of Ballard’s pending freedom hit the victims’ families hard. They trusted the state to find the right man, and they say they’re struggling with the notion ! that the high court threw out his conviction.
Courts can’t calcula te the cost of an error this massive. But they can learn from cases like Ballard’s. Florida’s criminal trial system is adversarial — one lawyer pitted against another — but in too many cases, indigent defendants rely on overburdened, underfunded public defenders. These lawyers are often highly skilled, but have nowhere near the resources they need to adequately investigate cases and prepare defenses.

Florida leads the nation in overturned convictions, which could be read two ways — either the state’s trial system is lax, or the appellate system is exceptionally good at catching trial-court errors. Ballard’s case doesn’t shed light either way, but other cases travel between courts for years before innocence is proven.

Justice demands that Florida’s leaders take a harder look at those overturned convictions. They’ll find patterns: cases based at least in part on questionable jailhouse snitches; others relying on faulty eyewitness identification; prosecutors ! who go too far in their quest for a conviction.

Other states are looking for ways to minimize wrongful convictions by controlling these common avenues to error. Florida owes it to John Robert Ballard and every other citizen to make the criminal justice system as accurate and fair as possible.

Ballard case

Another Innocent Inmate to be Freed From Death Row
Posted: February 24, 2006
The Florida Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction of death row inmate John Robert Ballard and ordered his acquittal in the 1999 murders of two of his acquaintances. The Court concluded that the evidence against Ballard was so weak that the trial judge should have dismissed the case immediately. The primary evidence presented against Ballard was a hair and a fingerprint, both of which he could have left during his many visits to the victims’ apartment. Bloody fingerprints and a 100 other hair samples were found associated with the crime scene, none of them belonging to Ballard, who has always maintained his innocence. You can read more about this case on Death Penalty Information Center Web site