Last Meal : Darrel Grayson - The Problem with Alabama

"Atticus had used every tool available to free men to save Tom Robinson, but in the secret courts of men’s hearts Atticus had no case. Tom was a dead man the minute Mayella Ewell opened her mouth and screamed." ~ Harper Lee, "To Kill a Mockingbird"

“The poor quality of indigent defense is still the ugliest scar on capital punishment in America.” ~ Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative of Alabama in a NY Times article published June 9, 2009.

I’ve been taking turns at the easel with the Darrell Grayson Last Meal painting that I began this past summer and while it’s been kicking around the studio the whole time, it is more often than not covered. This serves two purposes – it keeps me from brooding over what has to be changed to move the composition forward and saves me from answering any questions about the innocence of Darrell Grayson. There are a myriad of issues surrounding the debate about capital punishment and innocence is not the only one.

As I’ve written previously, Grayson was executed in Alabama in 2007 for the rape and murder of an elderly woman in 1982; while he freely admitted being capable of committing the crime, he had been drinking heavily and reportedly had no memory of that evening. While physical evidence was collected at the scene of the murder, the State of Alabama repeatedly refused requests to have a DNA test performed that would either confirm or deny his involvement. A black man with little income, he was represented at trial by a court-appointed divorce lawyer with no experience in capital cases and was convicted by an all white jury. (His last meal, by the way, consisted of a cheese omelette and sliced tomatoes.)

The lack of representation in capital cases is a particularly troubling issue throughout the United States, but particularly in Alabama which has a long history of ineffective legal support of capital defendants and which has no public defender’s office. Following conviction (in trials that often take days as opposed to weeks as in other states) death row inmates are often forced to navigate the appeals process without any legal representation even when new evidence has come to light that might prove their innocence. There is also no legal requirement or procedure by which an inmate can obtain DNA testing of evidence, nor any requirement that that evidence be held, meaning that the evidence by which an inmate might be able to prove his innocence may actually be destroyed before he has secured access to it.

In a state in which judges campaign for office on the promise to use the death penalty and can overturn a jury’s sentence (and many do – almost a full quarter of Alabama’s death row inmates are there due to a judge overriding a jury’s lesser sentence) it is imperative that defendants receive the best defense possible, however the small amounts paid to public defenders is so low as to be laughable. To my mind, a black man who finds himself in Mobile might just want to keep moving on up the road.

To quote Ken Silverstein in his article, "The Judge as Lynch Mob" (from Machinery of Death, edited by David and Mark Dow, 2002)

“Alabama’s death row occupants are overwhelmingly poor – 95 percent are indigent – and they are in the racial minority. Blacks make up just 26 percent of Alabama’s population, but 46 percent of death row, higher than the national average of 43 percent.…[T]he lingering effects of Jim Crow attitudes on the state judiciary are obvious: there are few black trial judges in Alabama, the court of criminal appeals is all white, and the only two African Americans on the Alabama supreme Court were both voted out in November 2000.”

This post is admittedly brief, but there’s plenty of information available for those wishing to learn more about the application of justice and the death penalty in Alabama. Aside from the abovementioned NY Times article and the collection of essays in Machinery of Death (which is recommended reading in my house), the American Bar Association has issued a damning report of Alabama’s justice system and recommends a number of changes, as well as a full moratorium on executions in the state. For current stories and more information on issues of racial bias and inadequate counsel surrounding the death penalty, visit the Equal Justice Initiative website.