Judge Sleet blasts Delaware death penalty case

Last-minute legal wrangling in 2012 led U.S. District Court Judge Gregory M. Sleet to twice delay the execution of convicted killer Shannon Johnson, but each time a higher court overruled him.

The 28-year-old was executed in the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center near Smyrna on April 20, 2012, at 2:55 a.m. – just 74 minutes after the final override.

Now, three years later, Sleet is criticizing the death penalty process, saying Johnson's execution "highlights profound failings in our judicial process."

His comments – a rarity since judges usually remain tight-lipped about their cases – are featured in a 10-page article he wrote for the summer edition of the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice magazine.

"The Johnson case, and its result, is by far the most troubling I have encountered," Sleet wrote.

Death penalty opponents and advocates haven taken notice, especially since his comments come just months after Delaware legislators failed to repeal the death penalty for the second time in two years.

"Judge Sleet has a reputation for being a very thoughtful person," Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center Robert Dunham said. "When someone like him writes something like this, we should be concerned."

Johnson's case was unique – he wanted to be executed despite his sister's efforts to halt his execution at the last minute.

Johnson was convicted in the September 2006 killing of Cameron Hamlin, a musician who had begun dating Johnson's ex-girlfriend and the mother of his child.

One evening, Johnson set out to find his ex-girlfriend in hopes of reconciling. He found her sitting in front of her home in a car with Hamlin.

Johnson pulled out a gun and began firing into the car, fatally injuring Hamlin.

Prosecutors said Johnson then stalked his ex-girlfriend for several weeks, finally catching up with her on Nov. 10, 2006.

Johnson, who evaded detection by sometimes dressing in the all-covering garb of a Muslim woman, fired at and hit his ex-girlfriend. He stopped and fled when his gun jammed, police said.

After his arrest five days later, prosecutors said Johnson tried to hire an inmate who was going to be released to kill the woman and prevent her testimony. He was eventually found guilty in 2008.

Johnson waived his appeals, speeding up his own execution. In the week before his 2012 execution, his sister, Lakeisha Truitt, and the Federal Public Defender's Office attempted to spare his life.

The public defender tried to convince Sleet and then the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals to halt the execution.

Sleet stayed the execution twice, the second time arguing that Johnson was not mentally competent to speed his own execution and that a state competency review was flawed. He wanted more time to digest the lengthy briefs that had been filed in the case.

"The case is troubling to me not because I was certain, based on the parties' filings, that Johnson was, in fact, incompetent — he very well may have been competent. Rather, the case was and remains disturbing to me because, in the unnecessary haste to execute Johnson before his execution certificate expired — a haste arguably exacerbated by the State and the Third Circuit – I believe that the judiciary's fundamental role of ensuring due process, as realized through an adversarial process, was sacrificed or, at the very least, undermined."

The appeals court, however, vacated the stay and refused to hear Johnson's case. He was executed less than two hours later.

Sleet wrote that it was wrong for the appeals court to vacate the stay "without a single court – state of federal –reviewing the process and the constitutionality of the state court competency proceeding."

Thomas J. Reed, a professor emeritus at Widener University Delaware Law School, said challenging a state competency review is difficult.

"I'm not surprised the ruling went against Johnson," Reed said. "I haven't heard of it going any other way in our state."

Johnson is the last person to have been executed in Delaware. Fifteen inmates are currently sitting on Delaware's death row.

In recent decades, Reed said at least two other death row inmates waived their appellate rights because they wanted to die.

"No questions about their mental competency were raised," he said. "One cannot assume that a convicted murderer sentenced to die by lethal injection is mentally incompetent on the theory that no competent person would choose to hasten their death."

But because it was Johnson's sister who intervened and asked the court to have Johnson submit to a mental exam — which he did not cooperate with — the death sentence was not set aside, Reed said.

"It is a sad situation," he added, "and difficult because Johnson's murder was heinous and fit the parameters for a death sentence under Delaware law."

The death penalty has been in place statewide since March 29, 1974, after it was reinstated. Delaware is one of 32 states with capital punishment still in place.

Legislators attempted to repeal Delaware's death penalty in May, but was blocked by a crucial House committee for the second time in two years.

Lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee declined to release the bill from the committee in a 6-5 vote. The result was the same that kept similar legislation unresolved two years ago.

Gov. Jack Markell has said he would sign a repeal bill if it made its way to his desk, calling capital punishment an "instrument of imperfect justice."

For Kristin Froehlich, board president of Delaware Citizens Opposed to the Death Penalty, the state's judicial system is indicative of problems associated with the death penalty nationwide.

Sleet's speaking out against the process is helpful in hopefully getting lawmakers to pay attention to the flaws in the system, she said, and ridding the state of the death penalty for good.

"Delaware is going to execute an innocent person if we don't change this," she said. "Judge Sleet's article points to that rush to execute without sufficient due process."

Froehlich, who is the sibling of a murder victim, knows firsthand the grief process, but she said killing someone else and using the death penalty as a crutch for punishment isn't the answer.

"It's not an inexpensive system. It's not a deterrent," she added. "It's kind of an emotional response to a horrible situation, and it's not good enough."

Sleet's article offered suggestions for fixing the failing death penalty process in the courts.

He said that while Johnson's guilt was not in dispute – there was eyewitness to the shooting and his own admission – the court should have been allowed to review the state's competency hearing where Johnson waived his appeals.

"Nevertheless, if one of the goals of our adversarial process is, as I believe it to be, to 'preserve the integrity of society itself,' we must face the fact that, in so far as the administration of the death penalty is concerned, the process is broken," Sleet wrote.

Sleet isn't the first judge to voice his concerns about flaws in the judicial process, especially when it comes to competency proceedings, Dunham said.

More recently, aggrieved judges across the country have spoken up about their frustrations with court proceedings and the lack of control they have in overruling decisions.

In many cases, Dunham said, people who are mentally ill will argue that they don't want their lawyers pushing for a competency hearing because they believe they are in a fine mental state.

However, this interference by defendants and unwillingness to cooperate is "often evidence of their incompetence," he said.

"It amounts to placing a greater value on the finality of a state court judgment than on the accuracy, reliability, fairness or constitutionality of that judgment," Dunham said.

Sleet wrote that he hopes his comments will be a starting point for analysis and action. He declined to talk further when he was reached for comment Thursday.

"Thus while it is impossible to remedy any possible constitutional infirmity in Johnson's case, it seems to me that it is incumbent upon as as participants in the legal process at issue, especially those of us at the very heartbeat of that process, to continuously evaluate whether that process has functioned consistent with both our notions of due process and societal precepts of what is or is not fair," he wrote.

Contact Jessica Masulli Reyes at (302) 324-2777, jmreyes@delawareonline.com or Twitter @JessicaMasulli. Contact Brittany Horn at (302) 324-2771 or bhorn@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter at @brittanyhorn.