By: Mary Kathryn Lancaster, Summer 2024 Intern
The following blog post is part of the SCADP Oral History Project, where individuals share stories of their connection to SC's death penalty.
John Blume began his involvement with the death penalty after a teenage mentee of his, Arnold Green, was sentenced to 25 years to life for murder as a result of his involvement in a robbery during which the elderly victim had a heart attack and died. “I don’t know why I was so shocked by this, I was naive at the time,” Mr. Blume said of the incident, “but I thought that this was the greatest injustice that had ever happened on the face of the Earth.” This motivated Mr. Blume, who was a Yale Divinity School student at the time, to attend law school. While he was a Yale law student, he began working on death penalty cases with a Georgia lawyer, Millard
Farmer and that was when he knew he wanted to represent persons on death row as a career. After graduating from law school in 1984, clerking for a federal judge in Atlanta and working at a small civil rights firm in Charleston, Mr. Blume and David Bruck, opened a law firm in Columbia, SC. “There wasn’t anyone really doing much on the capital defense front at the time, so we figured we were better than nothing,” Blume said. After a few years, federal funding became available, and Blume was hired to create and be the first Director of the South Carolina
Death Penalty Resource Center, which is still in existence as Justice 360. In 1997, Blume was hired by Cornell Law School as a law professor and as Director of the Cornell Death Penalty Project which still works closely with the attorneys at Justice 360, many of whom are former students of Blume’s.
Mr. Blume discussed the difficulties of toiling against the death penalty in South Carolina as well as several areas where progress has been made. The political environment in this state has always been hostile to anti-death penalty legislation: “There has never, in my forty years of representing persons on death row in South Carolina, been a real chance opportunity for legislative abolition.” He noted that the death penalty is not currently the hot topic political issue it once was, but the state legislature is not going to eliminate it or even likely restrict its use. Additionally, Mr. Blume explained how the current Supreme Court of the United States is also hostile to criminal defendants generally and to persons on death row specifically. But, that is not to say some progress has not been made. When South Carolina finally adopted life without parole as the alternative to the death penalty, something prosecutors and pro-death penalty members of the General Assembly opposed, the number of new death sentences began to drop. But he noted an unfortunate by-product of embracing life without parole was the proliferation of
people serving natural life sentences.
Blume noted that the creation of the statewide capital trial unit has also contributed to the dwindling size of South Carolina’s death row, which is not half the size it was in the mid 1990’s. Mr. Blume also believes that the work of the Innocence Project and others who have exposed numerous wrong convictions in capital cases has also contributed to public skepticism about the death penalty. “The reality now is that prosecutors are much more likely to seek the death penalty than they were twenty or thirty years ago, and when they do, jurors and judges are less likely to impose it,” Blume said. One hopeful sign for South Carolina, Blume noted was that Virginia recently became the first Southern state to legislatively abandon the death penalty. While he said that is unlikely to happen anytime soon in South Carolina, it is proof that the politics of capital punishment has started to shift.
One of the things Blume has most treasured throughout his decades long career is the relationships he has forged with his clients. He discussed his friendship with Richard Johnson, who was executed in 2002. Mr. Blume is convinced, as were two members of the South Carolina Supreme Court, that Richrd was innocent. Mr. Blume noted that Johnson’s death still “haunts [him] to some degree” as he wonders whether there was something else he could have done to save Richard’s life. Additionally, Mr. Blume was particularly close with Joe Atkins, a Vietnam Veteran and Native American who suffered from extreme trauma as a result of his military
service, the details of which “the jury that sentenced him to death never really heard.” Mr. Blume said that it was “like losing a family member when Joe was executed.” Mr. Blume explained that capital punishment dehumanizes people and reduces them to “the single worst thing they have ever done in their life.” “How would you like to be judged solely by the worst thing you ever did in your life? Does that totally define you?” He believes his job as lawyer for the condemned is
to rehumanize these individuals and show judges, jurors and the public that people on death row are not the monsters they have been made out to be but are human beings with the capacity for redemption and transformation. He said, “I think one trip to death row to meet some of the people society has turned its back on would convince most people I am right about that.”
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