Even he had found nothing wrong with Dugar nor had he shown any doubts whether Dugar should be executed
Even he had found nothing wrong with Dugar, nor had he shown any doubts whether Dugar should be executed.When writing the report, Honsiger had been asked to consider whether the death penalty was an "appropriate" penalty. Honsiger, unabashed even by his inability to spell, had written: "We feel that the deliberateness and visiciousness [sic] of the attack for no reason whatsoever removes the question of whether the sentence was disproportionate."By the end of the day, Stafford Smith felt he had won some crucial points, both in undermining the trial report and in extracting errors from Judge Planchard which could serve as ammunition at later hearings. Even so, it was to take a further three years before Dugar was removed from Death Row, after Stafford Smith won an argument to the Louisiana Supreme Court on the issue of proportionality - namely, that the death penalty was entirely inappropriate for a schizophrenic teenager who had committed such an aimless crime. Stafford Smith now hopes to have the conviction itself quashed on the grounds that Dugar was mentally ill at the time of the offence, and has submitted a further appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court to that effect.It is a savage irony, of course, that, having won in more than 200 low-profile cases like Dugar's, Stafford Smith should be best known in Britain for two spectacular failures. The first was that of Edward Johnson, depicted both in Fourteen Days in May, and in a sequel, The Journey, when the BBC producer, Paul Hamann, filmed Stafford Smith during a return to Mississippi in a bid to prove that Johnson was innocent.In retrospect, Stafford Smith agrees that Johnson represented one of his toughest cases and one that touched the most profound fears of white Mississippi. A poor black from rural Mississippi, Johnson stood convicted of murdering the local sheriff while robbing a white woman's home.Stafford Smith remains morally certain that Johnson was innocent. And although there were damaging details in the case against him, the more important point was that his conviction had been a farce Identification procedures were a travesty.
The judge was so anxious to complete the trial by the weekend that Johnson's attorney was told to limit his closing speech to 30 minutes - and was even cut off in mid-sentence with the words, "Time's up." But Stafford Smith had come into the case so late - three weeks before the execution date - that most possible stratagems had been exhausted by Johnson's previous lawyers.Ingram, Stafford Smith insists, should have been different. This time, he had been on the case almost from the start, going back to his earliest days at the SPDC in Atlanta, and spanning his move to set up the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center in New Orleans two years ago. He felt close to Ingram since they were both born, four years apart, in the same hospital in Cambridge. Although the evidence that Ingram had indeed committed a murder during a robbery was strong, Stafford Smith had been convinced that Ingram had an excellent chance of having his sentence commuted to life imprisonment, not least because 11 out of the 12 jurors had later declared that they had voted for the death penalty in the belief that it would never be carried out. Stafford Smith now believes that Ingram fell victim to the new and insensate compulsion in the US to apply the death penalty wherever possible, with New York becoming the latest state to reintroduce executions.
(The total now stands at 38 out of 51.)"Nicky had a better case than most," Stafford Smith says "But they just ignored us. Clearly, under the legal rules, we should have won, but they just didn't give shit. They wanted to execute him and they just steamrollered it."In the final days of Ingram's life, he and Stafford Smith forged a remarkable alliance to demonstrate their collective refusal to participate in the rituals which Stafford Smith believes are intended to give the death penalty a veneer of acceptability. It was in this spirit that Ingram declined to order a final meal, and spat at the chief warden when he was invited to make a last statement before being strapped into the chair.