Death Study Commission Proposed

The House Judiciary Committee today approved a bill which would set up a commission to study Tennessee’s death penalty.

The 16-member commission would have two years to study and craft recommendations to make capital punishment “uniform in its application and administration.”

The Senate sponsor is Doug Jackson of Dickson, a long-time death penalty supporter..

“I have amended the death penalty statute in the past. I have strengthened that statute. But I think we all have to acknowledge, given revelations of late with DNA technology, that innocent people can be convicted and awarded the death penalty. We need to just make sure that the application of the death penalty is fair.”

The study bill doesn’t include a moratorium on capital punishment.

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Jackson argues that judicial review systems – appeals – are not the same as learning why the system sometimes fail,.

“If you think about it, every time something goes wrong in society, if an airplane crashes, if a bus turns over, there are investigators that immediately come to the scene to determine, ‘Why did this happen? But when the judicial system breaks down, when there’s an accident there and an innocent person is convicted, we don’t have that accident team that goes in and examines that process to determine what went wrong.”

The commission would include two state senators, two members of the state House, two appointed by the governor, and representatives appointed by the Tennessee Bar Association, the Tennessee Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the District Attorneys General Conference, the District Public Defenders Conference, the Office of the Post-Conviction Defender, the Tennessee Justice Project, by Murder Victims/ Families for Human Rights, and by the group You Have the Power.

The committee is tasked to find a way to make the death penalty free from bias and error.

The bill is HB 2162 Briley/SB 1911 Jackson.

In the Senate the bill is lodged in the Delayed Bills Committee.