Word: rowed
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...When Brooks was killed at the state prison in Huntsville, Texas, his legal appeal was still pending before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Unlike every other death-row prisoner in history, Brooks was denied a chance to go through the full appeals process called “three tiered review.” Brooks had, in fact, already gone through most of the procedure. His last appeal could have taken several more months, but the Fifth Circuit Court refused to grant a stay of execution...
...Inmate Richart Houston, who lives in a cell on Florida’s death row, has summarized the flaws in the judicial system that led the Supreme Court to declare all statewide capital punishment laws unconstitutional in 1972: “Being on death row depends so much on class status, economic status, the ability to get adequate representation, how seriously the prosecutor seeks the death penalty, what kind of jury you get. It’s all pretty arbitrary, really...
...system may be arbitrary in individual cases, but a few overall trends stand out clearly. Between 65 and 70 percent of prisoners on death row are in states of the Deep South. About 42 percent of the approximately 1150 inmates awaiting execution are black, like Charles Brooks. Some historians call the racial bins an extension of the period between 1890 and 1920, when black men were lynched by mobs at a rate of one every 41 hours...
...Death row is full of the poor and the powerless. At the same time, as sociologist Jefferey Reinman has pointed out, government leaders such as Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon have never even gone to trial for their involvement in military actions abroad which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans in southeast Asia...
...case is a vivid example of the way legal "technicalities" have tipped the scales from favoring death row prisoners to favoring the state. Georgia officials, after all, never had to try to prove that Osborne's lawyer was not a bigot, or even that his feelings about his client shouldn't matter one way or the other. Instead, they were the beneficiaries of court rulings that said the issue was moot for procedural reasons...