BONUS | The Cost of Innocence

Hello everyone. I'm Carol Costello. This is a God Hook bonus episode. Last year I taught a podcast class at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a former student of mine, his name is Luke. Talk to a man whose brother was on death row. Luke is here with me now.

Thank you for having me. I'm happy to be here.

What was the title of that?

The Cost of Innocence.

I'm going to do something a little unorthodox now. I'm going to roll Luke's episode on the death penalty, the episode he produced for my class. Full transparency. This is one-sided, right, Luke? Is that fair?

Definitely one-sided,

But I think it gives the other perspective because I think through The God Hook, maybe we illustrated many reasons why some people believe fervently in the death penalty. So this is a look at the other side, so to speak.

Yeah.

Alright, let's roll the tape. Here is the cost of innocence.

As a quick warning before I begin, this story contains graphic details that may disturb you. Please listen with care.

The criminal justice system is like the devil.

Charles Keith lived in fear for almost 30 years that his brother Kevin would die at the hands of an executioner on Ohio's death row for a crime that he claims his brother did not commit.

I was in a prayer state. I mean I lost and I asked my savior, show me how to save you, and he showed me how to save my brother.

After years of fighting, Charles, with the help of an Ohio public defender, managed to get Kevin Keith's sentence commuted to life. The Innocence Project says since 1973, at least 200 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated. That means 200 people could have been killed for no reason. So if you're like me and you aren't comfortable with that reality, why don't we just abolish the death penalty already? I'm Luke, and this is the Cost of innocence. In 2009, 63-year-old Romell Broom suffered an agonizing ordeal on Ohio's death row. According to the death penalty Information Center, Broom was strapped to a chair while Executioners attempted 18 injections, they often missed Broom's veins, and they even stabbed at his bones. Eventually they injected him with saline solution. Hard as his executioners tried, Broom would just not die.

They just stuck him so many times and the thing about it, he was just so willing, you lose a will to hold for your own life. These guys are there, they're numb. You haven't given 'em any type of thirst for life, and you've made a person lay on death row and think about death and then to impose a sentence upon someone that you know that would not want that same sentence imposed upon you or your loved ones, even if those crimes were committed.

Charles's brother Kevin knew Broom.

He said when they took Romell Broom away to execute him. I mean everybody was in awe, but what really stunned them is when they brought him back, everybody thought they had saw a ghost because you don't come back from the death chamber alive.

That's right. When the combination of lethal drugs did not kill Broom guards brought him back to his cell on death row. It was the only time anyone on death row was allowed to touch another inmate,

One of the guards let him out. He went up and hugged Romell Broom and one other guy went up and hugged Romell Broom. He says, man, you got to be a godsend. And do you know the governor, which was Ted Strickland? He spared my brother's life. He spare Romell Broom's life was Romell Brooming of dying from COVID, and there was one other guy after that. The only two guys that touched Romero Broom are the two guys that Ted Strickland spared after that incident.

Broom was convicted of raping and killing a 14-year-old girl in 1985, so no one's saying he didn't deserve punishment, but even Ohio's governor at the time, Ted Strickland thought that what happened to Broom was wrong. He commuted Broom's sentence to life and he also commuted Kevin Keith's sentence. The question remains is execution something that we want on our nation's conscious, both morally and ethically?

When I had that moment at the day of judgment where I'm supposed to meet with God and I have to account for the things I did, there's some things I've done that I ain't proud of, there's things I need some forgiveness for, and it's that moment of how do I hope that God will be merciful and forgiving to me if I'm not merciful and forgiving to other people?

Dr. Amir Hussain is a theologian at Loyola Marymount University. He has spent his life exploring religion's role in culture, ethics and justice.

And so when you talk about death penalty, this idea that, oh, when you murdered the person that murdered your loved one, that will somehow bring you peace. That's not somehow bring me closure. It's like, no, because my daughter's still dead. Yeah, the guy that killed her is dead too, but that doesn't make her alive.

Dr. Hussein says that we avoid discussions surrounding death and that we've created a society where capital punishment is shrouded in myths and misconceptions.

We don't expect to die. Death is an old world thing. We're in the new world and we're America. We live forever.

In other words, Americans avoid abolishing the death penalty because that requires us to face our own mortality. Most industrialized countries around the world have faced that reality and don't sentence their prisoners to death. The United States is inching toward it. 23 states have abolished the death penalty, but the rest, Ohio, Texas, and Florida included still carry out executions.

It's overwhelmingly black and brown folks like who gets the death penalty and who does? Now, part of that goes back to who gets charged with the crimes and who doesn't, and that is completely unfair.

Studies show that defendants of color are more likely to receive the death penalty, particularly if the victim is white. And despite decades of litigation, the racial disparities in the death penalty sentences have changed. Very little Charles Keith, an African-American man himself is all too aware of this.

All the death penalty cases, all these cases are poor people crimes. These are not white collar, these are not professional crimes, drug crimes, poor murder, drug induced murder, robberies. These are poor crimes, so they know the death penalty is targeting the poor. It's not going to be spousal murder or alcohol related or anything like that.

I wondered how Charles felt about the American attitude towards capital punishment and he did not pull any punches.

I used to think it was Americans and it's not Americans, it's Christians because the church could step up at any time. You've never heard the church step up and say, Hey, this is wrong. We've been teaching. Thou shall not kill. So if you're teaching, thou shall not kill. How can you stand by and allow killing to happen and still allow these same politicians to come to church and serve with you on Sunday to an executed savior?

It's easy to understand why Charles feels the way he does about Christians.

I tried taking it to the church and local churches, I'm not going to say every church, but the churches that I knew of and they closed their door on me. That's the thing that hurt me the most because I was talking about a topic that nobody wanted to address and that was the death penalty and whether a person was guilty or innocent. So they basically washed their hands of it. It wasn't a matter of my brother being guilty or innocent, it's just that they would not assist me nor support.

There are those who still believe in an eye for an eye. According to a 2022 pew research study, more than half of Americans support the death penalty if someone commits murder. Some denominations support it outwardly like the Southern Baptists. But Dr. Hussein points to religious texts that question the very foundation of the death penalty.

The Quran is very explicit on this and it follows a Jewish teaching. The Jewish teaching that it follows is that killing one person is like killing all of humanity and saving one person is saving all of humanity. What it says is that yes, you do have the right for the death penalty, that you can't have the death accepted crimes like murder, like what we'd call a treason, that kind of thing. But even there, the family of the murdered person has the right to argue that we don't want this done.

And it's not just Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism all have teachings that urge compassion, forgiveness, and mercy over punishment.

Now we think of the cross and now the cross is the most powerful symbol of Christianity. For the first 300 years of Christianity, Christians had used that symbol that was too terrifying a symbol because that was the instrument of Rome's punishment there. So Christian symbols were Jesus's the land of God, Jesus's the vine, us being the branches, the bread of life, the water of life. You didn't have this kind of thing until you became the state power, until you became the state thing. And this goes back to the sense of, okay, what do you do when you're in that position?

In order to dive a little deeper into the issue, I wanted to know more about the conditions on death row. I talked with a lifelong public defender who did not wish to be named out of respect for his clients who for him the death penalty isn't just a case number or a name on a list. He's seen the conditions inside death. Row cells witnessed the toll of endless legal battles and stood beside his clients as they face the possibility of execution.

So our office is appointed to represent people as the last possibility of them receiving some kind of relief and not being executed. Most states you have your trial, you're convicted, and then you have a state appeal, and then you have a federal appeal. And because I work at the very last stages of those cases,

I wondered if he thought that death penalty could ever be human. And he shared a story with me that broke my heart.

A lot of times. Some of the people that are put to death, obviously we talked about some of them actually having been innocent and they're being exonerated after they've been executed, and then others who are clearly not competent to know what they have done. I remember one story, I don't remember the inmate's name, but when he was given his last meal, he left his dessert and one of the guards said to him, aren't you going to finish your dessert? He goes, no, I'm going to save it for tomorrow. This was on the eve of within an hour before he was executed. So I mean, he wasn't even able to comprehend that he was about to be killed.

When I asked him about the death row conditions that people like Charles's brother Kevin endured, ironically, he says that keeping people alive on death row is a worse form of punishment.

One of the things that I have come to understand over the years having been to death rows in several states as well as the federal death row, is that the conditions that these people are in are horrible. And if they were subjected to life in prison and taken off death row, but still subject to life in prison, in many ways that would actually be even more punishment because it's really you're talking about an environment where in many cases they have no more than an hour outside of their cell every day, sometimes less.

But if that's all true, if life on death row is worse than execution, why do 27 states still carry out the death penalty?

I think a big part of this is the state wants to discourage more crime and violent crime, so they take a hard line stand on it. A lot of families have never been able to recover from the loss of someone in their family, and I think that that's a huge motivating factor, and they are given, I think, an enormous amount of respect for their opinions. Remarkably though, I've had a number of people who have lost family members who have over time because of the circumstances of the crime, they said, look, it's not going to bring my father, brother, sister, mother back, and they have paid their price and they're sorry for it.

The death penalty has been defended as a deterrent against crime. But research suggests that this is far from the truth. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, there is no credible evidence that capital punishment deters crime more effectively than life sentences without parole. In fact, murder rates tend to be higher in states. They use the death penalty than in those that do not. But fear of crime ramped up by politicians has made it difficult to convince people that death penalty is not the answer. Politicians tap into the anxieties of Americans and channel them into support for crackdowns and tough on crime policies like Bill Clinton's 1994 crime Bill. At the time, it was heralded as a necessary response to violent crime in America. It promised safer streets, more police on the beat and harsher penalties for offenders. But for many, including Charles Keith, this bill didn't feel like a promise. It felt like a threat, a threat to black and brown communities, a threat to poor communities and a threat to families like his.

And what I had found out that had put the pressure on this case is that President Clinton was promoting his violent crime bill. So when he comes into Ohio, February 15th, 1994, my brother's arrested that morning. And so it looks good for the city of Osirus because of that heinous murder that they had. So they have a suspect, but what they did, they went on and indicted him with no evidence. And that has been the most difficult thing in my life is to fight is something where there there's no evidence.

Charles claims that the consequences were real. His brother's case, like so many others, was caught up in this era of tough on crime policies where justice was reduced to the simplest terms, punishment and incarceration. Just a day before Kevin's sentencing, Clinton delivered a speech touting the benefits of the crime bill.

What's the bottom line? One. We've got to have a stronger police presence, not only to catch criminals, but to prevent crime. The senate's approved and the house should approve another a hundred thousand police officers over the next five years.

Today, the crime bill is often blamed for ballooning our prison population and an abysmal recidivism rate. Charles said The law exposes the way our system prioritizes convictions over fairness. Instead of asking whether justice was served, the system became focused on closing cases. On meeting political promises. Charles insists that it's no coincidence that his brother in prison for a triple murder was swept up in the policies designed to clean up crime. It's an uphill battle for Charles, though a federal appeals court upheld his brother's conviction last year. But Charles vows to fight on, he enlisted the help of many people including celebrity Kim Kardashian, and he's learned a lot about the criminal justice system along the way.

So while they were busy, I was busy and I had built a campaign to keep my brother alive. So everybody knew who he was and they were paying attention to what this state was trying to do to him. Had I done nothing, nobody would've never known who he was. He would've been executed, it would've been done and over. But I've made his case celebrity style, and that's what I knew. If everybody knows Kevin Keith, then the jig is up. You guys aren't going to be able to get away with this, and that's what I believe I'd done.

The death penalty forces us to face questions of justice, dignity, and humanity. It isn't about whether someone deserves to die, it's about what we as a society are willing to accept in our pursuit of justice. But at the moment, it seems even liberal California is getting tougher on crime propositions. 36 and six passed to just a couple weeks ago, which increased the punishment for petty theft and continue to allow forced labor in our prisons. But when the punishment is death, can we afford to take the most punitive measure of all, even if it costs over 200 attempts to inject someone writhing in pain and begging for the torture to end?

It's just like a lynch mob. You're out of here. So here we are 25 years later, and look how many there's been, what? A hundred sixty two, a hundred sixty three exon since they reinstituted the death penalty. How many other people are screaming? I'm innocent. The baddest thing is the young guys that are afraid to face the death penalty. They take the plea bargain of life without parole and you don't even hear 'em. That's sad though. The way they were using the death penalty as a weapon, they weaponized our own criminal justice system to wipe out young Americans.

So again, if you're like me and oppose the death penalty, you can call your local representative protest, or even run for office to make a difference, or you can volunteer, donate to, or stand in solidarity at an action with your local Innocence project. Visit www.innocenceproject.org for more information.

Thank you for listening and for your support. It's much appreciated. More bonus episodes to come. So as they say, standby.