 |
|
|
BREAKING NEWS!
After more than four years and the participation of nearly every staff member to ever work at FTI, the case of Charles Triplin was finally resolved. On December 5, 2007 a Cumberland County, NC jury returned a Not-Guilty verdict.
Charles maintained his innocence throughout his four-and-a-half- year ordeal and refused offers to enter a guilty plea that would have allowed him to avoid the risks of a death penalty trial. Three weeks prior to trial, Charles? case was declared non-capital, but he still faced a mandatory life without parole sentence if he had been found guilty.
Your assistance helps us ensure that FTI resources remain available to clients like Charles this year and every year.
Dear Friends:
Decisions of life and death in capital cases are made each year in scores of courtrooms across North Carolina. Each of these cases involves painful facts detailing the most frightening aspects of the human experience. How our state chooses to respond to these cases speaks volumes about our commitment to fairness and justice. Systematic inequities in the resources the state uses for prosecution and those allocated for defense remain deeply troubling. Indigent men and women are not ensured fair outcomes.
As we have since our founding, the Fair Trial Initiative continues to make a difference in this equation. With your help we are bringing new resources to bear, and we are changing the balance.
FTI Helps Bring Justice to Floyd Brown
In 2003, FTI attorney fellow Kelley DeAngelus joined the defense team of Mike Klinkosum and Mark Rabil, members of the NC Capital Defenders Office. By the time of their appointment, Brown had been held at Dorothea Dix Hospital for a decade while awaiting a determination that he was competent to stand trial.
The team began an exhaustive investigation into Brown?s case that led to discovery of lost evidence and fabricated confessions involving at least two law enforcement officers who subsequently served time in federal prison for corrupt police practices.
As a result of their extensive investigation into Mr. Brown?s well-documented mental retardation, the case ultimately proceeded non-capitally. As a non-death penalty case, Mr. Brown lost one of his two appointed attorneys, but Kelley remained an integrated member of the defense team. In fact, after leaving FTI for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation she transitioned from FTI fellow to representing Mr. Brown as one of his attorneys.
In the end, Kelley and Mike found nothing to connect Brown to the murder he was charged with committing. Convinced of their client?s innocence, Mike and Kelley worked tirelessly to obtain freedom for Brown. Because of the severity of his mental retardation, he had been properly found incompetent to stand trial and was unlikely to have his competency restored. He was caught in a vicious cycle of injustice: he was innocent of the crime he was charged with, but unable to get into to court to prove it. Meanwhile he languished at Dix.
For years the local district attorney refused to acknowledge that there was not even enough evidence to hold, let alone convict, Floyd Brown. Ultimately, the story of this injustice came to the attention of the national media. The Denver Post, LA Times, Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News and Observer began to cover Brown?s case and the extraordinary efforts of his attorneys. In an act of creativity, zeal, and daring, Mike and Kelley filed a petition for habeas corpus in Durham County earlier this year. Last month a judge in Durham County ordered Brown?s release.
Kelley and Mike freed an innocent man from what would have been a never-ending legal limbo. Their work has cast light on debilitating corruption within our criminal justice system that puts our most vulnerable citizens at risk. They have inspired a long overdue call for a state investigation into the processes and actors that could allow this happen.
Kelley and Mike?s tireless work was recently recognized by the ACLU of North Carolina. Side by side they will be receiving the 2007 ACLU of NC Award for their work at the annual event in February. During her time representing Mr. Brown, Kelley?s fellowship ended and she continued her work at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation.
FTI's Successes in 2007
In two FTI cases that went to trial, juries chose life; and in five others clients took life-saving pleas. Over one hundred district court cases were resolved. Two attorney fellows graduated and two new attorney fellows joined our team.
We also welcomed three new members to the FTI Board of Directors: Noel Tin, Jack Fernandez, and Tonia Osborn. And finally, FTI?s advocacy for reform of the criminal justice system and of how the death penalty is applied met with great success following the passage of several pieces of reform legislation in the North Carolina General Assembly.
This past year was not without loss, including the death of one of FTI?s Board of Directors vice-president, Kirk Osborn. We will be forever indebted to him for the leadership and mentorship he provided to the organization and our fellows.
With your help, Fair Trial Initiative will continue to identify and train the nation?s brightest new attorneys to be outstanding capital defense advocates. Your support ensures that we can continue to add significant value to capital defense teams in the coming year.
I hope you will take this time to remember FTI during this holiday season.
Sincerely,
Mark Kleinschmidt
P.S. Tax deductible contributions to FTI can be made safely here on our website. We welcome monthly or quarterly sustaining gifts.
- Over 120 people sentenced to death since 1973 have subsequently been fully exonerated. This includes five people sentenced to death in North Carolina: Samuel A. Poole, Christopher Spicer, Timothy Hennis, Alfred Rivera, and Alan Gell.
- Since 1997, the American Bar Association has called for a moratorium on executions nationwide, until such time as states can ensure that the death penalty is administered fairly and that there is only minimal risk of executing an innocent person. Among the problems cited by the ABA: "grossly unqualified and undercompensated lawyers, who have nothing like the support necessary to mount an adequate defense, are often appointed to represent capital clients."
- Two out of every three death sentences appealed nationwide between 1973 and 1995 were eventually overturned. Egregiously incompetent representation at trial was the single most common cause of reversal. In North Carolina, over 60% of death sentences handed down in that period were reversed on direct appeal or in state post-conviction. Another 10% were reversed in federal court.
- Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in North Carolina, the primary grounds for relief in state court have been ineffective assistance of counsel and prosecutorial misconduct. (This figure does not include inmates whose sentences were vacated upon a finding of mental retardation subsequent to Atkins v. Virginia.)
- Although reforms have been introduced in recent years to create more rigorous standards for death penalty lawyers, there are dozens of inmates currently on death row whose trial attorneys did not have the experience, knowledge, or resources North Carolina requires today. At least 16 people have been executed without having had the benefit of minimally qualified trial counsel.
- Technical procedural rules sharply limit the availability of relief in state court. Furthermore, the inmate has no recourse for any error made by counsel from this point on.
- With the passage of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, Congress severely restricted the ability of federal courts to review state trial court error.
- Earlier that same year, Congress eliminated funding for death penalty resource centers, which in many states housed the only competent capital attorneys available.
Mark Kleinschmidt, Executive Director
Mark Kleinschmidt, FTI's new Executive Director, joins FTI after six years as a staff attorney at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation where he represented nine members of North Carolina's death row and consulted in numerous other cases. Mark continues to represent several death row inmates in his new capacity as Executive Director. Mark earned his bachelor's degree in Education from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992 and his J.D. from University of North Carolina School of Law in 2000. He was also recently re-elected to a second term as a member of the Chapel Hill Town Council.
|
|
 |
 |
|
Sarah Anthony, Deputy Director
Sarah Anthony is FTI's Deputy Director. She was one of FTI's two inaugural law fellows [at the start of our agency] in 2001. Since then, she has served in a number of leadership capacities including as Interim Executive Director, Director of Training, and Director of the Mitigation Program. She has assisted in the representation of indigent defendants facing the death penalty at trial in over 33 cases, has gone to trial in six, and was important in securing an acquittal in one. She completed training at Eastern Mennonite University in restorative justice and has spearheaded the development of Defense-Initiated Victim Outreach work in North Carolina. Sarah graduated from Carleton College in Minnesota in 1988 and spent the next decade serving limited income people and focused on matters of race discrimination. She worked as a grassroots community organizer in rural Montana and later as a program director for an urban Head Start school. She completed training at the Montana Law Enforcement Academy and served on the City Police Advisory Board. Sarah is a licensed attorney and a graduate of the University of Virginia's School of Law in Charlottesville.
|
|
|
