Duane Edward Buck’s lawyers were a disaster.
After Buck was convicted of murder, his own attorneys retained a now-discredited psychologist who testified that Mr. Buck is more likely to be a danger to society in the future because he is black. This testimony then went unchallenged at a later, crucial state court proceeding even though Buck was then represented by a new lawyer. The only new claim that lawyer raised at this proceeding was “based on a non-existent provision of the penal code.”
Now, nearly two decades after his conviction, no court has considered whether the racist testimony elicited at Buck’s trial caused him to be sentenced to death. Moreover, thanks to errors committed by his previous lawyers and an array of laws and legal doctrines that often elevate the finality of convictions ahead of the need to ensure that innocents are not punished and that the death penalty is not doled out unnecessarily, it is far from clear that any court will examine the impact of this racist testimony before Mr. Buck is put to death.
The specific legal issue in Buck v. Stephens is complex enough to make a lawyer’s brain bleed. Specifically, Mr. Buck is seeking permission to seek a determination of whether “extraordinary circumstances” exist that would permit a lower court to determine whether the racist testimony elicited by his own counsel prejudiced the outcome of his sentencing proceeding. If he somehow succeeds in navigating this maze, he wins a new sentencing hearing — which could very well determine that he should be re-sentenced to death.
It’s a giant procedural mess. And it’s a mess that Texas, at one point, appeared willing to set aside. In 2000, then-Texas Attorney General John Cornyn (now a U.S. Senator) determined that Dr. Walter Quijano, the psychologist who testified in Buck’s case, had a record of appearing in capital sentencing proceedings and offering racist testimony. In Buck’s case, Quijano testified that African-Americans and Hispanics are especially likely to be dangerous as they are “over represented in the Criminal Justice System.”
Cornyn’s office found six additional cases where Dr. Quijano offered similar testimony, and it announced that it “will not object” if the inmates sentenced to die in these cases “seek to overturn the death sentences based on Mr. Quijano’s testimony.” As Cornyn’s office admitted in a brief filed in one of these cases “infusion of race as a factor for the jury to weigh in making its determination violated [a defendant’s] constitutional right to be sentenced without regard to the color of his skin.”
Nevertheless, when Buck sought relief from his death sentence four years later in federal court, the state did not keep its promise. Texas now claims that Buck’s case differs from the other six cases specifically because Dr. Quijano’s racist conclusions were placed before the jury by Buck’s own counsel. As Justice Samuel Alito argued in a 2011 opinion explaining why he did not believe that the Supreme Court should have heard a previous iteration of Buck’s case, “only in Buck’s case did defense counsel elicit the race-related testimony on direct examination. Thus, this is the only case in which it can be said that the responsibility for eliciting the offensive testimony lay squarely with the defense.”
the rest at :
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2016/04/25/3772111/everything-thats-wrong-with-americas-death-penalty-in-one-awful-case/