Are deaf people receiving a fair trial in our justice system?
On August 4, 1981, Felix Garcia accompanied his brother Frank, his sister Tina, and her boyfriend, Ray Stanley, to a pawnshop. Frank had a ring he wanted to hock. He said he didn't have his ID and asked Felix to sign the pawn ticket. The ring, it turned out, belonged to a man who'd been murdered the day before at a motel. Six days later police, having traced the ticket, arrested Felix at Tina and Ray's house.
Felix now says that he didn't understand the officer who read him his Miranda rights. In any case, he insisted he knew nothing about the crime, and he refused to sign a statement for the police. Michelle and her mother both later testified that Felix was with them at the time of the killing, eating pizza and watching videos at the mother's home. But Frank—who knew the victim and had left fingerprints at the scene—cut a deal with the state to avoid the death penalty. He pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and armed robbery and fingered Felix as the killer. Tina—who married Ray shortly after the arrest—also agreed to testify against her younger brother. It wasn't until nearly a quarter century later that Frank would confess that Felix had had nothing to do with the crime.
At Felix's trial, in 1983, an expert declared that the defendant had a 70-decibel hearing loss, which is considered severe deafness. Through most of the proceedings, he had cotton in his ears to stop the pus. Felix was given a hearing aid, which he said didn't work, and a loudspeaker, which amplified noise but didn't help him understand what people were saying. He tried to read lips, but the prosecutor often faced away from him, and he had no clear view of the witness box. In other words, he was largely clueless as to what was going on.
"Deaf people have a hard time when they are thrown into the criminal-justice system," says MacKay Vernon, a psychologist and authority on the deaf who is familiar with the details of Felix's situation. "The courts—judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers—just don't understand what they're up against. Turning up the sound system doesn't mean the defendant better understands what's going on. He just hears more noise. In the case of Felix, sign language interpreters wouldn't be much help because at the time of the trial he couldn't understand signs. And anyhow, sign language interpreters can't keep up with the speech in courts. Moreover, deaf people often don't have the vocabulary to understand. Their ability to read can lag far behind hearing people."
The first motion, arguing that Felix's constitutional rights were violated because of his inability to understand trial testimony, was quickly shot down. In Florida, as in many states, defendants have only two years from the time of their direct appeal to file such motions. The deadline for Felix had passed some 12 years earlier.
Traditionally, the federal courts have provided recourse for constitutional claims that have timed out in state courts. But the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, championed by Bill Clinton and passed with broad bipartisan support in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing, imposed time limits on such cases. "These statutes of limitations are just killers," says Steve Bright, senior counsel at the Southern Center for Human Rights, noting that the law cuts off appeals even in capital cases.
Laura Rovner, a former attorney for the National Association for the Deaf (NAD) who now runs the Civil Rights Clinic at the University of Denver's Sturm College of Law, says Felix could well have had his conviction overturned were it not for that missed deadline. Under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, any entity receiving federal money needs to have an effective communication system in place for the deaf or hard of hearing. "It is hard to think of a situation where that is more critical than where somebody is being tried for a serious crime," Rovner says.
The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) strengthened that requirement, demanding that the criminal-justice system take "appropriate steps" to make sure a disabled person can communicate as effectively as anyone else. This might require "appropriate auxiliary aids and services," such as a setup akin to closed captioning or an oral interpreter to facilitate lip reading.
In fact, criminal justice agencies "frequently do not honor the letter and spirit of the ADA and the Rehabilitation Act," says Howard Rosenblum, who heads the NAD. "The challenge has been to actually litigate against every law enforcement agency, lawyer, court, and prison that violate the requirements." The Justice Department could enforce the requirements, he adds, but to a large degree has failed to do so. (The DOJ asked me to submit written questions for this story but did not respond to them by press time.)
http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/12/deaf-prisoners-felix-garcia