While there were serious questions about whether Coe was even guilty of raping and killing a young girl -- the police found bloody sheets in the room of a prosecution witness whom the defense argued might have been the real killer, but they "lost" the evidence before testing the blood -- what is beyond debate is that Coe's public defender, like Dobie Gillis Williams' attorney, never introduced any mitigating evidence during his sentencing hearing. The jury never heard that he had been institutionalized in Florida for severe schizophrenia, nor did jurors hear anything about Coe's history of child abuse at the hands of his father -- evidence that ought to have mitigated against a death sentence.

Attorneys brought into the case late in Coe's appeal to the federal courts tried to introduce the mitigating evidence, but the federal courts, bound by the strictures of the Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, held that it was "too late" for such evidence to be considered. They ruled that Coe's original trial attorney and his first appellate attorneys had erred in not introducing that evidence at the state court level, and that it was thus "procedurally barred." (In an all too common Catch-22, the court also held that the seemingly outrageous error of not introducing readily available mitigating evidence was not sufficient evidence of ineffective counsel.)

As in Williams' case, a federal district judge did temporarily lift Coe's death sentence on the grounds of an erroneous jury instruction, but a three-judge panel of judges in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned that ruling on a 2-1 vote, and Coe was executed.

"The state of Tennessee decided to execute a mentally ill person. They knew he was mentally ill and that he had been an abused child, but they decided to go forward with Tennessee's first execution in 40 years," says the Rev. Joe Ingall, who came to know Coe during his years of incarceration on death row. "This case was all about the politics of death, not about justice. They needed to kill somebody, so they killed Robert."

After years of clamping down on death row inmates' right of appeal, the Supreme Court seems to have lightened up in recent months, making capital-punishment cases a little harder to win and a little easier to challenge. Besides its ruling that juries alone can vote for a death sentence, the court more recently lowered the standard of proof for death row inmates seeking to claim that their jury panels were unconstitutionally purged of minority jurors. The court also criticized the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals and lower federal courts in the district for accepting without question the rulings and procedures of state courts in death penalty cases, suggesting that "technicalities," which can be life-or-death matters in capital cases such as Coe's and Williams', while an important aspect of American jurisprudence, are not clear-cut matters of fact.

Finally, the court ruled that retarded people should not be executed, though it left unresolved how lower courts should determine what constitutes retardation.

But capital-punishment critics like Liebman, and even death penalty advocates like Blecker, argue that the problem of errors, in both the guilt and sentencing phases of capital cases, will continue to plague the system, at huge cost -- both psychological and financial -- to society and to inmates, and to the families of victims and inmates.

"Everybody loses," says David Elliott, a spokesman for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "Remember that people on death row have relatives, and those relatives are losing a loved one. And the victim's relatives have to live through years of trials and hearings. And then there's the prisoner," he adds. "If he's executed because of a sentencing error, that's terrible, but even if the error is eventually corrected, he has lived under the threat of death for years. We have seen these people, and afterwards many of them have something resembling post-traumatic stress disorder. They can't adjust to the reality that they aren't going to die."

Both Liebman and Blecker suggest that the quickest way to reduce these errors would be to ensure that all capital murder defendants are provided the resources to put on an adequate defense, and for legislatures and prosecutors to narrow the range of crimes that allow for a death penalty.

But mandating adequate defense counsel in capital cases is costly, and in most states, the burden of financing first-class defense counsel and appellate counsel for capital cases would fall on already strapped local governments. Raising taxes is always a hard sell. Raising them in order to help capital defendants beat the rap, or to help convicted killers contest their convictions or their sentences is an even harder sell. Yet critics of the system say something has to be done.

"When you have a death penalty system, and you start diluting it by executing people who don't deserve to die while not executing others who do, it means the system is breaking down," says Liebman. "What's needed is more honesty about what's happening. We have to have a commitment to get rid of all the error."

This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

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