Until It Came Knocking On My Door

Last week, MVFHR board member Bill Babbitt was the keynote speaker at the annual Capital Case Defense Seminar, held in Monterey, California. Bill told several hundred capital defense attorneys about his experience as the brother of someone who was executed in California and about MVFHR's No Silence, No Shame project. Two local television stations covered his talk, and an article appeared in the Monterey County Weekly.

Here's an excerpt from that article:

Today, Bill’s a board member of the Cambridge, Mass.-based Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights and an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. He speaks on college campuses, at conferences and at statehouses. Bill’s often joined by David Kaczynski, who led federal investigators to his brother, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. (David repeatedly has said that if his family hadn’t been able to hire an attorney, his brother, like Manny, likely would have received the death penalty instead of life in prison.)

This week, Bill comes to Monterey, where he’ll give the keynote address at the annual Capital Case Defense Seminar, a national symposium on the death penalty attended by some 1,500 lawyers. The four-day event is sponsored by California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and California Public Defenders Association.

Gail Jones, CACJ’s acting director, says the conference is the largest of its kind in the nation. “We bring in expert speakers on specific topics, forensics, all different areas of the law as it pertains to capital crime,” she says.

And while the seminar, dubbed “Death Camp” by attendees, focuses on the legal aspects of the death penalty, this year’s program comes at a time when the politics of the issue are in the news. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on whether the three-chemical cocktail used in nearly all lethal injections in the United States violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The court isn’t expected to rule on the issue for months; until it does, executions in California and across the nation have been halted temporarily.

While the high court considers the lethal-injection method, the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice debates the state’s enforcement of capital punishment—who receives the death penalty and how long the appeals process takes. At the commission’s first hearing on Jan. 10, judges and law professors said race, ethnicity and geography play a role in determining who is sentenced to die in California.

“It’s disproportionate and capricious,” Bill Babbitt says. “I believed in the death penalty until it came knocking on my door.”