JUDGES TAKE THREE INMATES OFF DEATH ROW

In just one week, three convicted criminals awaiting the death penalty in Missouri prisons have had their sentences -- not their guilty verdicts -- overturned. While it is reasonable to expect death-row inmates to seek every legal avenue of relief, it is difficult to understand the reasoning of the judges involved in these recent decisions.

For now, the death penalty is a well-used punishment meant not only to match heinous deeds with appropriate sentences, but also to send a message to would-be criminals. In every state that imposes the death penalty, there are strong lobbying efforts to have capital punishment banished. Missouri legislators hear from those lobbyists regularly. So far, there has been no big move in either house of the General Assembly to undo the death penalty.

In the three cases where the death penalty has been undone by judges, jury verdicts finding guilt have been left alone. It would seem that if a judge or panel of judges sees cause to reverse the penalty because of legal technicalities, they might also see fit to order new trials.

In these cases, the same juries that reached guilty verdicts also determined that the death penalty would be the appropriate punishment. These crimes aren't borderline criminal acts. They were all heinous acts that resulted in the loss of life for others.

One such death-row inmate is Faye Copeland, the 78-year-old farmer's wife who was convicted, along with her husband, of killing itinerant farmhands. Her lawyer successfully argued that the jury never was told she was a battered wife and only did what her husband forced her to do. A federal judge in Kansas City bought that line of reasoning and commuted her sentence to life in prison. Her husband died in 1993 while on death row.

In another case, a three-judge appellate panel agreed that Jahn Parker's jury wouldn't have imposed the death sentence if they hadn't had a mistaken impression that Parker murdered his girlfriend because she was going to testify against him on an assault charge.

And in the most recent case, another federal judge in Kansas City decided William Weaver's death sentence was unfair because the prosecutor excluded a black juror simply because she was black and might not vote to impose capital punishment on a black defendant. Three other jurors that heard the case were black.

In each of these cases, it sounds like either lawyers failed to do their jobs during the trials or judges prohibited vital testimony. In either case, it seems more reasonable to return the cases to jurors to make decisions and sentencing than to have judges overrule trial jurors.

While Missouri has one of the biggest execution rates in the nation, it appears it is also a good place to get death sentences commuted on technicalities.