Like Japanese soldier, AG Coleman doesn’t know death penalty war is already over | Opinion

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman won last year’s election in a commanding victory, a law-and-order politician who very much wants to be governor and might just get there.

But in his lawsuit to reinstate Kentucky’s death penalty, he’s more like Don Quixote, tilting at imaginary dragons, or Hiroo Onada, the Japanese soldier who spent 29 years in the Philippine jungle because he didn’t know the war was over.

That’s how one death penalty expert describes Coleman in his latest foray: “This train has left the station,” said Steve Bright, a Kentuckian whose work on the death penalty has done a lot to force it into near obsolescence across the country. “He’s a lot like that Japanese soldier.”

Last year, only eight states in the country imposed 21 death sentences, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The high-water mark was in 1996, when 315 people were sentenced to death.

The change? Mostly DNA, which helpfully proved that many people on death row had not done the crime. Since 1973, at least 197 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated, according to the center.

Also helpful were lawyers like Steve Bright, who showed over and over again that death penalty cases were skewed because against poor and minority defendants. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the death penalty in 1976, but has since declared it unconstitutional in such categories as the intellectually disabled or mentally ill.

“People try to rev it back up again, but it doesn’t usually get anywhere because it takes a long time, costs a lot and doesn’t accomplish much,” Bright said in a phone call from his office at Yale University Law School, where he teaches the fall semester before going to Georgetown University Law School every spring.

Bright might be the most famous Kentuckian you’ve never heard of. He’s a Boyle County native who went to the University of Kentucky for undergrad and law school, (he was student body president in 1970) and started his career at the Appalachian Research & Defense Fund. He headed the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, where he’s been for nearly 35 years.

A mentor of Bryan Stephenson of “Just Mercy” fame and the National Lynching Memorial, Bright has written with scholar James Kwaka a new book about his career called “The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts.”

Bright won four cases before the U.S. Supreme Court with justices ruling in favor of his client in each case. Three involved racial discrimination in jury selection and the fourth was about giving a poor defendant the right to a mental health expert as they faced the death penalty.

“Increasingly, if you give people the alternative, life without parole, which every state has, you can still protect the community,” he said.

Death penalty flaws

Kentucky is no exception to all the flaws of death penalty cases.

A Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting project on the death penalty cited a 2022 study by University of North Carolina professor Frank Baumgartner, who found that people sentenced to death in Kentucky are 14 times more likely to have their sentence reversed than to be executed.

He also found disturbing racial disparities in Kentucky death-penalty cases, including that cases with white victims are more than five times as likely to result in a death sentence as those with Black victims.

Another study in 2020 estimated that $440 million has been spent since 1976 on Kentucky death-penalty cases by prosecutors, defense attorneys and the courts — the equivalent of $146 million per execution.

In 2010, Franklin Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd ordered a ban on executions because there weren’t enough safeguards to make sure the state wasn’t executing intellectually disabled defendants.

Coleman is arguing that in order to serve justice and the victims’ families, the death penalty should be reinstated, even as two Republicans in the General Assembly have introduced bills to completely abolish the death penalty, replacing it with life without parole.

“For almost 15 years, Kentucky has been bogged down by delays as violent criminals tie up our legal system with costly litigation as they seek to avoid justice,” Coleman said in a news release. “The survivors of the victims of these horrific crimes have suffered in limbo for long enough.”

Neither have yet received committee hearings, held hostage by this year’s “Tough on Crime” theme by a bunch of legislators looking to get reelected.

But it’s made clear over this nation’s history that the death penalty is racially and economically discriminatory, and this country has clearly executed innocent people. That should be enough for anyone, no matter how much they want to be governor.

Like the Japanese soldier hiding in the jungle, it’s time for Coleman to get the latest news and then drop this fight.

As Steve Bright says, “At the end of the day, it’s just not worth it.”