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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Jensen describes Cook's character in the play as "a 19-year-old in a 44-year-old's body; everything in the world is brand new to him." He addresses the audience, recalling the DNA results coming in: "They said that would be the final nail in Kerry Cook's coffin. Instead, it finally took the nail out."
"When people talk about the death penalty," Jensen says, "they always bring up the victims and the crimes. Well, in releasing the people our show is about, the states have admitted that they never harmed the victims or committed the crimes. What we're trying to do with these innocent men and women is explore the three dimensionality of their experience, not just their incarceration, not just them getting sentenced to death and what that was like, but what their lives are like after as well."
Prosecutors have never pursued the new lead in Edwards' murder. "It's my belief that going after the actual killer would open them up to all sorts of legal ramifications," says Jensen. "It would be embarrassing for the state of Texas."
Cook's is the only case from Texas that appears in the play. "Very few people are exonerated in Texas," Jensen says. Indeed, Gov. Bush's state has freed only seven people from death row, accounting for a mere 8 percent of the total number of exonerated in the nation -- by contrast, Texas carries out 35 percent of U.S. executions. As of last week, 47 percent of all executions this year were in Bush's domain. By the end of the year, Texas is expected to have executed 50 inmates, which would bring its body count to more than all other death-penalty states combined.
The sheer number of executions in Texas, plus the disproportionately low percentage of Texas death-row inmates who are exonerated (3 percent compared to the national average of 14 percent) makes Bush's continued claim that Texas has never executed an innocent man or woman a cold and fuzzy one.
Bush asserted his role in capital punishment during the final presidential debate. "My job is to ask two questions, sir. Is the person guilty of the crime? And did the person have full access to the courts of law? And I can tell you looking at you right now, in all cases those answers were affirmative."
But in Cook's case, "full access to the courts of law" meant a court-appointed defense lawyer who was paid $500 by the state. "And in Texas, you get what you pay for," Cook says in the play.
One of the few safety nets that exists for those wrongly convicted is the window of time between death sentence and execution, when they have the opportunity to appeal. But that crucial window has been closing.
In 1996, President Clinton pushed through Congress what is perhaps the most innocent-be-damned legislation on capital punishment: the Effective Death Penalty Act, which cuts the appeals process by about two-thirds. "Had the act been in effect then, they could have killed Kerry four times," says Jensen. "This is crucial to our play," says Blank, "because it takes about seven years on average in these cases of innocence for the innocence to come out. With the Effective Death Penalty Act cutting that window down to two, three, four years, it puts us at a huge risk of executing innocent people."
In one of the most egregious executions in history, Jesse Tafero was put to death by electric chair by the state of Florida in 1990 -- two years before his wife's conviction for the same crime was overturned. Flames erupted from Tafero's head, and executioners had to pull the switch three times to stop his breathing. State officials attributed the display to "inadvertent human error"; someone had substituted a synthetic sponge for the proven natural one.
