Lambs to the slaughter

Shaffer, who helped free Adams, doubts the laws will do anything to speed up executions. Most of the current delays, he says, come from courts that take years to decide appeals that have been filed, not delaying tactics by lawyers.

Just last week, Shaffer says, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals finally ruled on a death penalty appeal he filed over five years ago.

"The most delay in the system is not by the defendant, it's by the court," he says.

Whatever the cause of delays, they do work to the advantage of innocent inmates, death penalty foes say. The more time an Adams or Brandley can buy, the better chance they have of proving they are not guilty.

A matter of years between sentencing and execution, Hall says, is a small price to pay for efforts to ensure that the innocent are not executed.

Remarkably, Price, of the Washington Legal Foundation, disagrees.
"At some point, you wind up having to make a trade-off," he says. "There is an unavoidable theoretical possibility of an innocent person being executed no matter what the safeguards are. You have to consider what safeguards are appropriate versus making the system so protracted that it's completely unworkable.