Several courts have delayed planned executions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which is caused by the CCP virus.
The period between the death sentence being warranted and the actual execution is typically when defense attorneys will try everything in their power to seek last-minute appeals and clemency applications, or delay the execution of their client.
Attorneys will do a lot of conferencing, interviewing, and traveling in order to build their case, but this is currently impossible with the restrictive measures imposed on society.
“Almost every aspect of legal representation is at a halt in the judicial system,” said Amanda Marzullo, a consultant with the Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal organization that is committed to exonerating wrongly convicted people. “People are effectively unable to prepare and investigate their cases,” she told The Marshall Project.
NTD refers to the novel coronavirus, which causes the disease COVID-19, as the CCP virus because the Chinese Communist Party’s coverup and mismanagement allowed the virus to spread throughout China and create a global pandemic.
In Texas, the executions of John Hammel, originally slated for March 18, and Tracy Beatty, originally slated for March 25, have been postponed by at least two months, “in light of the current health crisis and the enormous resources needed to address that emergency,” the appeals court stated, according to The Marshall Project.
In Tennessee, a six-month reprieve for Oscar Franklin Smith, who is slated to be executed on June 4, is currently in consideration by the state Supreme Court after a petition by his attorneys.
A 55-year-old Pennsylvania man, Walter Ogrod, was exonerated after more than two decades on death row after persecutors found him “likely innocent,” The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, but now his release is delayed because he is hospitalized after having contracted COVID-19.
To Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit that opposes capital punishment and compiles statistical data about the death penalty, the delays did not come as a surprise.
“Every state that intends to go forward with an execution during this health crisis will have legal issues,” he told The Marshall Project. “When you’re in the final weeks before an execution, access to a client is an absolute necessity and access to the courts is an absolute necessity. Where that access is impaired because of a public health emergency you simply can’t go forward.”
“It’s dangerous for the investigators to go out to interview people, and it’s dangerous for the people they want to interview,” Durham added, The Wall Street Journal reported. “Because it would be medically and professionally irresponsible to proceed, all the investigations in those cases have come to a halt.”
