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| Bob Macy of Oklahoma County |
Harvard report highlights the lion-sized role in modern death penalty of just four men and a woman, and how capital punishment is a ‘personality-driven system’
As head prosecutors in their counties, just five individuals have been responsible for putting no fewer than 440 prisoners onto death row. If you compare that number to the 2,943 who are currently awaiting execution in the US, it is equivalent to one out of every seven.
Or express the figure another way: of the 8,038 death sentences handed down since the death penalty was restarted in the modern era 40 years ago this week, some one in 20 of them have been the responsibility of those five district attorneys alone.
The five are profiled in a new report from Harvard Law School’s Fair Punishment Project. Titled America’s Top Five Deadliest Prosecutors, the report highlights the lion-sized role in the modern death penalty of just four men and one woman.
They are: Joe Freeman Britt of Robeson County, North Carolina; Donnie Myers of Lexington, South Carolina; Bob Macy of Oklahoma County; Lynne Abraham of Philadelphia County; and Johnny Holmes of Harris County, Texas.
Just how extraordinary this elite club of lawyers is can be seen in the biography of Bob Macy. Until his death in 2011, he was known as Cowboy Bob because of his traditional frontier dress sense: he always wore cowboy boots, a large cowboy hat, a black string tie, a black suit and a white shirt.
Over the course of 21 years as the top prosecutor in Oklahoma County, Macy put 54 people on death row. That gave him the distinction of sending more people to their potential deaths than any other district attorney in the nation.
And many did actually go to their deaths. According to records compiled by the Fair Punishment Project, 30 of those prisoners were executed.
That might have presented an ethical burden to some, but not to Macy. As he sat beneath his Tombstone poster, he ruminated on the “patriotic duty” of prosecutors to aggressively pursue death sentences. He was proud of having sent a 16-year-old, Sean Sellers, to the death chamber before the US supreme court banned the execution of juveniles in 2005.
Source: The Guardian, Ed Pilkington, June 30, 2016
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