The Supreme Court hears the Delma Banks case today. The issues: prosecutorial misconduct and bad defense lawyering. There's a good article on it in today's Christian Science Monitor:

It took Delma Banks and his lawyers 19 years to discover the truth. State prosecutors at his 1980 murder trial allowed two key witnesses to lie to the jury that sentenced Mr. Banks to death. But even after the deception was uncovered, a federal appeals court said it didn't matter.

On March 12, 2003, Texas corrections officers strapped Banks to a gurney and prepared a lethal injection. Then, with 10 minutes to go, word of a stay came from the US Supreme Court. Monday, the justices take up the Banks case to determine whether the misconduct of prosecutors and the ineffectiveness of Banks's own lawyer were so significant as to require the invalidation of his death sentence.

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert discussed the Delma Banks case in Pull the Plug in April, 2003, concluding:

Lying witnesses. Lousy lawyers. Corrupt prosecutors. Racism. The death penalty is broken and can't be fixed. Get rid of it. "

Herbert notes there is an issue in the Banks case that the Supreme Court refuses to address: race

A study on race and the death penalty in the U.S. that is being released today by Amnesty International notes the following: "Since 1976, blacks have been 6 to 7 times more likely to be murdered than whites, with the result that blacks and whites are the victims of murder in about equal numbers. Yet 80 of the more than 840 people put to death in the U.S.A. since 1976 were convicted of crimes involving white victims, compared to the 13 who were convicted of killing blacks."

The Amnesty report asserts, correctly, that studies have consistently found that the criminal justice system "places a higher value on white life than on black life."

Our Delma Banks coverage is here.