The Fire Last Time
By Elizabeth Bruenig
The New York Times
January 18, 2021
Excerpt
Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 attack in Oklahoma City spurred legislation that gutted death row inmates’ rights. In the wake of the siege of the Capitol, will we make a similar mistake?
Political pressure for a legislative response to the Oklahoma City bombing began as the rubble was being cleared. In a decade already racked with anxiety about terrorism and violent crime, the heightened visibility of incidents involving home-brewed extremism, like the siege of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, added a nightmarish new element to America’s fears.
With a strong public mandate, the Republican-controlled Congress set to work with a good deal of leverage against the Democratic president, Bill Clinton, given the upcoming election. By 1996, roughly a year after the carnage in Oklahoma, Mr. Clinton signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (A.E.D.P.A.) into law.
Mr. Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and a founder of the Texas Innocence Network, has studied the impact of the A.E.D.P.A. on capital punishment for over a decade. Since the passage of the act, he told me, executions have been carried out more quickly. He said the law also led to a significant decline in successful petitions for relief filed by death row inmates.
“Insofar as the published cases reveal,” Mr. Dow wrote in a 2009 chapter written with Eric M. Freedman of Hofstra University’s law school, “the success rate for capital inmates on federal habeas has fallen dramatically — to levels about a fifth what they previously were.”
Read the full article on The New York Times website.
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