The US Supreme Court was asked to look again last Thursday afternoon at the case of a black man in Alabama who had been condemned to die.
Brian Baldwin, accused of killing a young white woman, was called 'that savage' in court by the district attorney who prosecuted him, and 'boy' by the judge who tried him and sentenced him to death. Later, the same judge heard his main appeal.
Black jurors were systematically excluded from the trial, and there was no evidence save Baldwin's confession - extracted, he had said throughout his 22 years on death row, by beatings and shocks from an electric cattle-prod. Last month a former senior police officer swore an affidavit stating that Baldwin had been beaten and confirmed that a cattle-prod was kept in the police station.
However, the Supreme Court justices took only minutes to decide that Baldwin's constitutional rights to due process and equality under the law had not been infringed. They declined to hear the evidence. At a minute past midnight on Friday morning, Baldwin, 40, died in Alabama's electric chair.
Opponents of the death penalty say the case - which was virtually ignored by the American press - provides grim new evidence of the US legal system's failure to provide the most basic protection for human rights. Former President Jimmy Carter said there was 'no doubt that racial prejudice was a significant factor' and urged Alabama's Governor, Don Siegelman, to halt the execution. Eleventh-hour appeals were made by the Vatican and Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King.
Baldwin came from a troubled home in Charlotte, North Carolina, and for much of his teens slept on the streets, drifting into crime. In March 1977, just after he turned 18, he absconded from a reform school with a fellow inmate, Edward Horsley. They ended up in Monroe County, south-west Alabama, a remote, dirt-poor region of pine trees and bean farms. There police had found the body of Naomi Rolon, a white girl aged 16. Baldwin and Horsley were arrested, interrogated and separately tried.
Nine years before his own execution in 1994, Horsley wrote a statement confessing that he robbed Rolon and slit her throat, but insisted that Baldwin played no part in the crime. Horsley's clothes were stained with blood, though there was none on Baldwin's; the killer, according to experts, was left-handed - as was Horsley, but not Baldwin. The only evidence against Baldwin was his confession.
Long before Baldwin's trial, the US Supreme Court ruled that to choose a jury on grounds of race was unconstitutional. Forty-six per cent of Monroe County's population is black. At the start of Baldwin's trial, there were 11African Americans on the jury panel. The prosecutor, District Attorney Theodore Pearson, used his power to remove all of them, with the approval of the judge, Robert E. Lee Key.
The defence attorney, Windell Owens, who had been assigned to the case by Key, raised no objection; neither did he protest when Pearson, in his closing speech to the jury, pointed to Baldwin and called him 'that savage'. In another, unrelated case, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals concluded that Key and Pearson had practised 'intentional racial discrimination' in jury selection. In 1987, Pearson prosecuted another black man, Walter McMillan, for murder. Key sentenced him to death. Six years later, an appeal court freed McMillan when it emerged that Pearson had concealed evidence proving his innocence.
In Alabama, the most important stage of the death penalty appeals process comes with what is known as the 'coram nobis' hearing. Baldwin - now represented by new lawyers - appeared to have a strong case and alleged that there had been racial discrimination in the selection of the jury and Key's conduct. The appeal was listed for October 1987, 10 years after the trial. Astonishingly, the judge assigned to hear it was none other than Robert E. Lee Key.
It is a fundamental principle of justice that no judge shall be judge in his own cause. Yet Baldwin had to try to persuade Key to accept his own racially discriminatory behaviour. Key ruled that he had been absolutely fair and the death sentence stood.
Key also heard the 'coram nobis' appeal of Edward Horsley. In that hearing, he told Horsley's lawyer he was a 'disgrace to the bar' for representing him, adding: 'That boy has been tried and convicted and the state should already have put him to death.'
In prison, Baldwin was growing up. With other inmates, he founded Project Hope to campaign against the death penalty. He took correspondence courses, filling the gaps in his education.
Meanwhile, the US legal process ground on. As in any death penalty case, Key's 'coram nobis' decision was reviewed by successive, ever grander, panels of judges, concluding with the Supreme Court in Washington. His new attorneys, Jack Martin and Michael McIntyre, had handled more than 20 death row appeals, and until Baldwin they had never lost a client. They approached senior judges and prosecutors from across the US and persuaded 33 of them to sign a supporting brief for the US Supreme Court, which stated that every stage of Baldwin's case had been characterised by 'racism and bias'.
Any one of the courts which reviewed Key's 'coram nobis' decision could have intervened. Any one could have accepted Baldwin's plea - that for a judge to rule on whether he himself was racist was 'a fundamental miscarriage of justice'. The case reached the US Supreme Court last month. Its judgment consisted of two words: 'Certiorari [reversal of the lower courts' decisions] denied.'
In the last weeks of Baldwin's life, a flurry of investigative effort by his friends and lawyers produced important new leads. Most compelling was an affidavit from Nathaniel Manzie, a former deputy sheriff of Monroe County, saying he had seen Baldwin being beaten, and that when the police took the suspect to the scene of the crime they had waved guns and fired them in an attempt to intimidate him.
With the execution scheduled for Friday, Martin and McIntyre filed a new brief in the Alabama state courts. Last Monday they were given less than 24 hours' notice to appear before Judge Braxton Kittrell in Mobile.
They sought to bring Manzie, aged 75, to court from his nursing home. However, shortly before the hearing Manzie, who is seriously ill, collapsed. Kittrell refused to grant an adjournment and attempted to hear Manzie's evidence by telephone. Unconvinced, he refused to issue a stay of execution, pending a full 'evidentiary hearing'.
Once again, Baldwin's lawyers tried to get the decision reversed in a series of desperate motions up as far as the US Supreme Court. But for Baldwin, time had run out.
As is usual in Alabama, his execution was witnessed by the Associated Press. Its reporter said Baldwin tried to make a death chamber statement. But he was overcome with emotion and his words were inaudible.