Dannie has his eyes opened working with death row inmates

A YOUNG Ennis legal masters graduate has just returned from a five-week internship with the Texas Defenders Service in Austin, Texas, where he worked on cases of prisoners facing the death penalty.

Dannie Hanna, 23, from Clonroadmore returned from this life-changing experience last week and is keen to share his eye-opening findings with the public.
The eldest son of Elie and Aine, Dannie is the only member of his extended family to pursue a legal career.
He graduated top of his class in law from NUIG in 2008 and landed a scholarship from the Cambridge European Trust to do a Masters in Law at Cambridge University, which he completed at the start of the summer.
Part of his masters involved an internship and he was one of a handful of students to be chosen to do pro bono work on cases for the Texas-based Defenders Service, an NGO working towards getting life sentences without parole, rather than the death penalty for those charged with capital murder.
Dannie’s head and heart is very much geared towards human rights and his introduction to this was through voluntary charitable fundraising he and other students were involved in during his years as a student in NUIG.
“With a group of students, I founded a junior version of the Rotary Club, which they called the Rotaract. We raised money for local and national charities and managed to raise thousands for a range of causes from Cancer Care West to the Jack and Jill Foundation. It was great to be involved in that kind of fundraising and we all felt we were doing something worthwhile. I’m still really interested in doing more voluntary work,” Dannie explained.
On the first case that Dannie and a fellow student researched for the service, while still in Cambridge University, he found that the man involved was innocent.
“This was a guy with a low IQ – not with an intellectual disability but with an IQ that put him as borderline. Due to this he was easily led and very vulnerable to controlling characters. He was essentially used as the fall guy for his brother, who was smarter. It was the first time that I came across involuntary voluntary confessions. It is completely shocking that it is legal in the United States for the police to tell a suspect for a murder that they have DNA evidence against them which connects them to the murder, when they haven’t. In many, many cases, especially in someone who is very vulnerable, this will solicit an untrue confession. It’s very sad and in my opinion it’s wrong.
“I was 100% sure that he was innocent. Essentially what myself and the other students working on that case with me did was pre-trial research into the case. He had already been charged with murder and was serving his sentence. We sent the findings of our research back to the Texas Defenders Services at the end of last year. It takes a long time for capital murder cases to come to trial but we will follow-up to find out what happens at the trial,” Dannie added.
He said he was lucky to get to work on a pre-trial case. “Most of the cases that the group of us in Cambridge worked on were appeals that the Texas Defenders Service were handling. We also did research in the form of trial projects. I got to work on different points of law central to given sample cases. I also did a lot of research into the legal age at which the death penalty can be applied. In many States it’s 18, in some it’s lower and some it’s higher, even 21. I was working on research that shows that the human brain is developing until the age of 25, so on that basis, the death penalty age should clearly be raised,” he remarked.
“I’m personally absolutely against the death penalty for a number of different reasons. For one, it’s inhuman. I agree the crimes that those who are guilty on death row commited are heinous, but putting a person to death for whatever reason is wrong and in my opinion, any legal system should recognise that. I also feel that being on death row, or the equivalent unbearable kind of prison regime, for 10 years or more, is enough punishment. These inmates are in complete isolation for 23 hours a day. Their only physical contact with any other human is when the prison offer takes off their handcuffs and strip searches them. Their only recreation is in a cage with no air conditioning, in the case of Texas at temperatures of about 41 degrees, for a full hour. One inmate that I spoke to, Patrick Henry Murphy, told me that his hour of recreation inside that cage is spent running around in a circle,” he said.
“Another reason I’m against the death penalty is because inmates on death row cannot afford the kind of lawyers that the likes of OJ Simpson could so, basically, they don’t stand a chance of any kind of decent defence case being built up. It takes 2,000 hours to do a basic introduction for a death row case and most lawyers won’t give that to a case which they ultimately don’t feel they have a chance of winning”.
While working with the Texas Defenders Service, Dannie also worked on the case of a 23-year-old who was charged with murder.
“His background was that he had served in Iraq for six months, had seen his best friend blown-up in front of him there and subsequently suffered from post traumatic stress. He ended up killing a homeless man. Clearly this man had severe mental health issues that should be used as mitigating circumstances in his favour. There were six completely conflicting witness accounts to what happened on the night the homeless man was killed. I felt it was a very sad story.
“The man charged with this wasn’t doing well and his mental health is not good at all. This case is going to trial on October 4 and I am hoping so much he is found not guilty, or at worst that he gets life without parole but not the death penalty. The facts of these cases are deeply distressing and it isn’t easy for someone who is sheltered to some extent like I am to get my head around such matters,” Dannie admitted.
While on his internship in Austin, Dannie also worked on an appeal for a man who is currently on death row.
“We used a mitigation expert to point us in the direction of things we could look at in this case. This man is in his late 40s, as far as I know, and we went back to all of his old school records to see where his problems may have started. We found that he had mental health issues. Over the years he was in the care of social services, but he had constant abuse hurled at him. In the last property he was living in, he claims that the landlady treated him like dirt and didn’t provide basic things for him. One day he just had enough and he got a gun and shot this woman and her husband. He was assigned a state-appointed lawyer. Through this mitigation expert, we looked at how housing stress can effect someone’s mind and this is going to be part of the Texas Defenders Services defence for this man.”
Dannie also met three death row inmates, two with other lawyers and one on his own, Patrick Henry Murphy Junior.
“Most of the lawyers working with the service are Harvard and Yale graduates, who are top notch and seriously committed to the cases they work on. I have learned so much from them,” Dannie commented.
He explained further, “Patrick is a convicted rapist since the 1980s, In 2000, along with a group of six other prisoners, he broke out of the general population prison in Texas. They became known as the Texas Seven. They were on the run for six weeks. They ended up carrying out a petrol station robbery and a police officer that arrived on the scene was shot dead by the group, not by Patrick but by another member of the gang. The law in Texas is that if someone is part of a group that is involved in the killing of a police officer, they all face a capital murder charge. One of the gang killed himself at the scene. Another has since been put to death and said just before death was administered that he deserved what he got. The state is now working their way through the remaining five, including Patrick. His record isn’t good and this is a big, big case. His background is very sad. He comes from a broken home and as a child, his stepmother rather than toilet-train him, used to pin his nappy to his skin and leave it on him for weeks on end. He has the marks on his body to this day. Every few weeks when he saw his birth mother, she would change his nappy during his visits but then repin a nappy to him, before sending him back to his stepmother. He suffered serious neglect and abuse and he’s never been right.
“During my meeting with him, I asked him about his choices and he said he never had any and that when he did, he made all the wrong choices. I think it’s very sad. This guy never really had a chance in life. I’m not saying that the things that he did were right because they weren’t, but life was cruel to him too. He wrote a letter to me after our meeting in which he outlines what it’s like on death row and his words were a real eye opener. The strange thing was that to talk to him he was a nice guy. The best that we can hope for for Patrick is life without parole.”
It also shocked Dannie the way some lawyers dealt with cases. “In some death row cases, there was totally ineffective counsel but yet appeals were refused. It’s shocking,” he commented.
Dannie says his experience has been life changing in many ways. “I’ve met people now and read cases of people who are awful and have done awful things and they certainly deserve to be punished accordingly, but not to be exterminated. Texas’ legal system is very harsh; 50% of all executions in the United States in 2009 were in Texas. It’s engrained in people’s mind there. A jury in Texas is the point where it’s decided whether someone will be tried for life imprisonment or capital punishment, so in a state where the public believe in the death penalty, that’s a big problem to start with.
“What the Texas Defenders Service is trying to do is convince the public that there is another way of dealing with such crimes, other than the death penalty. Once that happens, the law can change,” he said.
Dannie’s internship was for five weeks from August 7 to September 18, but he hopes to return again in the next 18 months to work with them for up to three months.
Dannie has also landed himself another great opportunity for a young person in the legal profession. Next week he starts work as a researcher with the Law Reform Commission in Dublin for a year, under its president Katherine McGuinness. Seven other law masters graduates are starting there at the same time. After that he has secured a position with a top London-based commercial law firm, Travers Smith, which will enable him to qualify as a solicitor.
“I realise that I have to get all of my legal qualifications before I can go any further. I am very much looking forward to that position too and it will inform me of commercial law, which will be wonderful to have for business purposes. My long-term plan is to work on human rights, but that could change once I get a taste of commercial law. If it does, I will work voluntarily on human rights issues, because they are very important to me,” he added.