An abolitionist group mourns a former death row inmate.
William Nieves sat on Pennsylvania's death row 2,190 days for a crime he didn't commit.
His supporters say his case was severely flawed from the start. A Philadelphia native and ex-con, Nieves was convicted of first-degree murder, and sentenced to death in 1994. His attorney had never before handled a capital case, and advised his client not to testify in his own defense.
Nieves eventually won a new trial in 2000, and later learned that eyewitnesses had told police he wasn't the shooter. The shooter was a short black man. Nieves was a taller, light-skinned Puerto Rican.
After hearing the new evidence, a jury returned a unanimous verdict of not guilty. Nieves was released a week before his 35th birthday, after spending eight years in prison--six of them on death row.
Using Nieves as an example, the Pennsylvania Abolitionists United Against the Death Penalty (PAUADP) is once again calling for a moratorium on the death penalty. The group plans to gather outside district attorney Lynne Abraham's office Thursday at noon to ask: How many more innocents sit on death row?
"William Nieves was not the only one," says Jamie Graham, PAUADP's Philadelphia representative. "There's more innocent people on death row who've been put there by the DA's office. He's not the only person who's lost years off his life."
PAUADP has held its monthly vigils outside Gov. Rendell's Center City office. This month they're returning to the DA's office to protest the handling of Nieves' case.
Graham says assistant district attorney Roger King withheld the eyewitness evidence that would've exonerated Nieves in the first trial, a charge that DA spokesperson Cathie Abookire adamantly denies.
"No evidence was withheld," says Abookire. "The state Supreme Court granted a new trial because of ineffective counsel."
Possibly further damning Nieves was the fact that he was poor and Latino.
There are 233 prisoners on death row in Pennsylvania. Seventy percent of them are minorities.
In a 1999 study, a Pennsylvania Supreme Court committee found that "race plays a major, if not overwhelming, role in the imposition of the death penalty." It also found a "significant failure" in the delivery of legal counsel to poor capital defendants.
The committee recommended that Rendell impose a moratorium until it could be ensured that the death penalty was "fairly and impartially" imposed.
Since Rendell took office, he's signed nine death warrants, six of them for minorities. In 2003 PW reported that the governor doesn't support a death penalty moratorium because he has yet to see any "compelling" evidence that the system is flawed.
Abookire says that in Philadelphia, "the death penalty is applied fairly, based on the facts and evidence of the case."
But Graham disagrees, adding that five inmates have had their death sentences overturned in the last 19 years.
was released from prison, he traveled the country, advocating against the death penalty.
In April 2001 he told the Daily News: "Death penalty law does not guarantee against the innocent being executed."
While incarcerated in 1993, Nieves was diagnosed with hepatitis C, which went untreated until he was released in 2000.
PAUADP's Graham says the group will continue to mourn Nieves' death, "and fight for the living."
"There's not much we can do for William at this time," says Graham. "But we can try to keep more innocent people off death row, and fight so people don't receive an illegal death sentence."
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