When guilt or innocence is a matter of life or death

One man’s wrongful conviction highlights the perils of the death penalty

Kirk Noble Bloodsworth doesn’t want to get into details about what life was like in prison for the eight years, 10 months and 19 days he spent in a Maryland penitentiary for a crime he didn’t commit.

“Prisons aren’t a good place to be, especially for someone accused of something like that – it was awful,” said the 52-year-old, the first US death row inmate to be exonerated by DNA testing. While behind bars he was subjected to attacks by other inmates but he fought back. “I gave as good as I got,” he said.

Newly married in 1984, Bloodsworth was convicted of the brutal rape and murder of nine-year-old Dawn Hamilton whose body was found in leaves after a game of hide and seek. Two boys wrongly identified Bloodsworth as the killer. He had recently moved to Rosedale, a suburb of Baltimore County, after being discharged from the Marines. A jury took just two hours to sentence him, then 22, to death.

While in prison Bloodsworth read how scientific evidence had been used to find a killer in an English town of 5,000. “This was where I had my epiphany – if it can convict you, why can’t it free you?” he said.

He applied for his case samples to be DNA tested. The results showed he was not Hamilton’s killer. He was released from prison an innocent man on June 28th, 1993 after two years on death row.

“As soon as I got out, they executed a guy who was right behind me, who was next in line. They executed him the same time they gave me a pardon,” said Bloodsworth.

Witness to Innocence

Now part of the Philadelphia-based Witness to Innocence non-profit organisation that campaigns for the abolition of the death penalty, Bloodsworth believes Maryland is close to repealing capital punishment.

A bill pushed by the state’s Irish-American Democratic governor Martin O’Malley to abolish the death penalty in Maryland advanced a step further last Thursday when a key senate committee approved the legislation for the first time, sending it to the full chamber for a vote this week.

O’Malley, tipped as a possible Democratic candidate in the 2016 presidential election, has put the repeal of capital punishment and gun control legislation at the top of his agenda.

Maryland, where five prisoners remain on death row, would become the 18th state to ban the death penalty, replacing it with life in prison without a chance of parole.

According to Witness to Innocence, 142 death row inmates have been exonerated, including 18 due to DNA testing. The organisation also helps secure compensation for those who are released. Bloodsworth received $300,000 after he walked free, or $3.72 for every day in prison. He is campaigning now for a federal compensation fund to be created for former death row inmates.

There were 43 prisoners executed in the US last year, though the bulk of them were clustered in Texas, where 15 inmates were put to death, and in Oklahoma, Mississippi and Arizona, which were each responsible for six executions. The four southern states accounted for more than 75 per cent of the executions in the US.

Support for the death penalty has declined in recent years. Maryland would be the sixth state in as many years to abolish capital punishment after New Jersey became the first state in 23 years to repeal the death penalty in 2007. New York, New Mexico, Illinois and Connecticut have followed since then.

Glaring mistakes

The last inmate to walk free was as recently as December when Seth Penalver was acquitted of three murder charges in Florida after 13 years in prison. He is the state’s 24th exonerated death row prisoner.

“The biggest issue is the mistakes and Maryland had a very glaring one [with Kirk Bloodsworth’s case],” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre in Washington DC.

“The fact that the wrong person might be executed has caused ripples. The whole system has slowed down because of the rightful fears that mistakes could have been made. You now have executions not going ahead because people are getting skittish about the death penalty.”

Montana and Colorado may be the next states to move to abolish the penalty as politicians vote on repeals later this year, Dieter said.

“We have had a 75 per cent decline in death penalty sentences since 2000, a 50 per cent drop in executions, fewer people on death row and public opinion that is supportive – all of these are signs of a move away from the death penalty,” he said. “Now politicians can say they have real reservations about the death penalty and still get elected.”

Bloodsworth says that the abolition of the death penalty across the US is only a matter of time because of the number of innocent people, like himself, who have been sentenced to death over the years.

“It can’t happen soon enough for me,” he said.