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24th July 2008

Yesterday at 6pm 34 year old Dale Leo Bishop was executed by lethal injection in Mississippi. He became the 13th man in the US to be executed since April, when the Supreme Court ended a 7-month stay on executions by ruling that the lethal injection did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The 14th followed soon after, when at 6:18pm 40 year old Derrick Sonnier was executed in Texas.

Dale Leo Bishop’s execution ends another tale of inconsistency and injustice in the American criminal justice system. He was convicted of the 1998 murder of Marcus Gentry, even though the state itself concedes that it was his co-defendant, Jessie Johnson, who actually killed Gentry.

However, Bishop was tried before Johnson and despite the evidence his trial lawyer allowed him to waive his right to a jury trial, Bishop even asked the judge to sentence him to death. As a result, he was sentenced in 2000, while Johnson was later tried before a jury and received a sentence of life without parole.

Any experienced defence lawyer would have questioned why Bishop had reacted the way he did at trial. This is exactly what Reprieve volunteers working on Bishop’s post-conviction relief hearing did. They gathered documents and witness statements which proved that Bishop suffered from a chronic mental illness (bipolar depressive disorder, formerly known as “manic depression”) and had undergone horrific trauma when he was young, which clearly affected his capacity to make rational decisions at trial.

Bishop’s family noticed problems with his behaviour and thinking when he was four years old. His elementary school records from Texas have many references to these problems and to evaluations that showed that he needed serious help. When he was in middle school, his school counsellor recommended a psychiatric consultation. The psychiatric hospital Dale’s mother took him to advised immediate inpatient hospitalization, but Mrs. Bishop could not afford the high price of this care, meaning he was not diagnosed and treated for his illness until he got to death row. The volunteers also found evidence that Bishop’s father was an abusive alcoholic who beat his wife and children – including Dale Bishop – on a weekly basis.

However, when the volunteers showed this evidence to Bishop’s lawyer at the time, Robert Ryan of the publicly funded Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel, he ‘fired’ them and didn’t follow up on their leads. Instead, he filed papers claiming that Bishop was mentally retarded, while attaching documentary evidence that proved that he was not (his IQ was 90, which is well above the accepted threshold of 70). As with Bishop’s initial trial lawyer, he also made no mention of the fact that Bishop himself had not caused the death of Marcus Gentry. Unsurprisingly, on the evidence presented, the Mississippi Supreme Court denied the appeal.

Unfortunately for Bishop, effective counsel came too late in the day to save his life. Despite every effort made by his lawyers to stay the execution and the many letters sent by Reprieve supporters to the Governor of Mississippi, Bishop’s request for clemency was denied yesterday afternoon. The Governor sent the following letter to Bishop:

“Dear Mr. Bishop:

Your lawyer has provided me with a petition for executive clemency. Having reviewed the materials, I find no justification to grant clemency or to interfere with the carrying out of the sentence; therefore, the request is denied.

May God have mercy on your soul and grant you forgiveness and the gift of eternal life in His presence and in that of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.”

Dale Leo Bishop was pronounced dead at 6:14pm.

Responding to the news, Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, said:

“It turns your stomach. With adequate representation from the outset, Dale would still be alive today. How anyone can stand up and defend the death penalty when justice is such a lottery is beyond comprehension.”