Death row lawyer Gary Proctor originally from Northern Ireland recounted his experiences relating to his work in America when he addressed an Amnesty International meeting in Belfast last week.
Proctor who graduated from Queens University Belfast in 1995 has been working on death penalty cases in the US since 2000. He has been involved with twenty death penalty cases in Louisiana, Mississipi, Florida and Washington DC including the cases of Tracy House and Kris Maharj.
Speaking in an interview with The Epoch Times he said, "I first got involved in this work when I was living in Bermuda and there was a guy from Bermuda on death row. I wouldn't call it a vocation but the work is very meaningful to me.
"I would think nothing of working into the early hours of the morning on a case. The judiciary system fails miserably over here. Last year, there were 22,000 homicides and 300 accused were sentenced to death row but if they had had a good lawyer they would not have received the death sentence, I have seen some lawyers asleep in court.
"One in six people sentenced to death row will eventually be proved innocent or have their sentence commuted, just recently a guy named Kirk Bloodsworth who was on death row for the rape and murder of a child had served ten years when DNA evidence proved conclusively that he was innocent", said Mr. Proctor.
The play Exonerated which was directed by Tim Robbins played on Broadway for 600 performances tells the true stories of six people sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit.
One was Kerry , a sensitive Texan brutalised on Texas death row for twenty two years before being freed by DNA evidence. Another was Gary a Midwestern organic farmer condemned for the murder of his own parents and later exonerated when two motorcycle gang members later confessed to the crime.
Another was an African American horse groomer who spent seven years on Florida's death row for the murder of a white woman before evidence emerged that the victim was clutching hair from a Caucasian attacker and David a shy man with aspirations to the ministry was bullied into confessing at eighteen to a robbery murder that he had nothing to do with.
Then there is Delbert, a poet who was convicted of rape and murder in the Deep South in the 1970s and later freed when evidence surfaced that he was not even in the state when the crime occurred.
Proctor said, "I am against the death penalty not only because of the possibility of sending an innocent person to their death, I've had three clients executed, but there is also the economics off it. It costs three to five million dollars to keep a man on death row because of all the court cases and appeals.
"Life imprisonment costs the state 600,000 dollars. All of my clients have come from an abused back ground and the juvenile agencies over here are a joke.
"Their job is to rehabilitate young offenders but in fact they are a breeding ground for criminal activity. If they were doing their job right there would be a far more positive outcome but there is not.
"Life imprisonment I feel is a suitable punishment because they are constantly monitored and allowed little contact with other human beings", said Mr Proctor.
The Amnesty International death penalty campaign group campaigned recently on the case of Scottish man Kenny Ritchie who had spent twenty years on death row before being freed at the beginning of this year.
Amnesty reported that at least 3,347 people were sentenced to death in over fifty countries in 2007.
"The U.N. General Assembly took the historic decision to call on all countries around the world to stop executing people. That resolution was adopted last December with a clear majority which shows that global abolition of the death penalty is possible", said Amnesty International in a statement.
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