Christine DeMaso, Reprieve Fellow 2007-8
Christine DeMaso graduated from Columbia Law School in 2007. While in law school she interned at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and with the Southern Center for Human Rights. She also served as an Articles Editor on the Columbia Law Review. Christine is using her one year Reprieve Fellowship with the American Civil Liberties Union Capital Punishment Project in North Carolina to challenge the execution of individuals who were accomplices in murders, but did not intend to kill. Christine is collecting nationwide data regarding the past execution of accomplices to felony murders who had no intent to kill and preparing a model pleading in anticipation of litigation challenging the execution of this category of defendants. The model pleading will argue to the courts that there is no longer the societal support for the execution of people who neither killed nor intended to kill, in the same way that the US Supreme Court eventually accepted that there was no longer support for the execution of juveniles or the "mentally retarded."
Having flown across the country and then driven across Mississippi, I finally found myself sitting across a table from our client. Looking at him through the wire mesh and hearing him talk about how one day he would love to travel and see the world, I thought about why I was there. This young man, not even 20 years old, was in prison, waiting to find out if he would be sentenced to death, and all for allegedly following his friends into a robbery. The state claims that they broke into a house, and when they were surprised by the occupant and a woman he knew, one of the codefendants shot and killed both of those people. Even under the state’s version of the facts, the man I was speaking with, who thanked me for the Thanksgiving card our office sent, did not kill anyone, and he never meant to kill anyone, but because of Mississippi law he faces society’s ultimate sanction. For me, this man is the face of my project, a representative of the many defendants who unjustly face, and even receive, the death penalty without killing or intending to kill anyone.
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