Bar Association calls for death penalty changes 

A legal team assembled by the American Bar Association is calling to reform Arizona’s use of capital punishment after finding “serious problems” with it after completing a 21-month study.

The report, issued by the Arizona Death Penalty Assessment Team, found four problematic areas. The authors of the report included Arizona State University law professor Sigmund Popko; Kent E. Cattani, chief counsel of the capital litigation section at the Arizona Attorney General’s Office; former Arizona Supreme Court Justice Thomas A. Zlaket; and private attorneys Jonodev O. Chaudhuri, Larry Hammond and Jose de Jesus Rivera.

The first major recommendation is to create a centralized capital defenders’ office to ensure the same standards are being applied throughout the state, said Mr. Popko, who served as chairman for the team.

“We have a fragmented, Balkanized system with no proportionality,” he said, comparing the differing death penalty standards of Arizona’s 15 counties to the dissolving of the south-eastern European nation of Yugoslavia.

Defense counsels are also not adequately compensated to “meet their obligations” in capital cases, no mechanism exists to ensure that sentences are not applied in an arbitrary manner and Arizona does not with enough accuracy define “especially cruel, heinous or depraved,” according to the study.

A committee with the State Bar of Arizona is currently examining and proposing definitions for “especially cruel, heinous or depraved,” which is an aggravating factor that can support the implementation of the death penalty, the study noted.