The stories are so frequent that we’ve become desensitized: Someone is freed after spending a major part of life behind bars, sometimes thirty years or more, because DNA evidence has proven the person innocent.
This phenomenon calls for some courageous new thinking about the supposed infallibility of eyewitness testimony, about our trial procedures in general, and about how much coercion and trickery police should be allowed to obtain a so-called confession. But it virtually SCREAMS for a rethinking of the death penalty. That’s because many of these exonerated parties had spent time on death row, sometimes just days away from execution.
There are many reasons to question the appropriateness of the death penalty. The most obvious is the fact that it is permanent, irreversible, and no amount of compensation by a court or legislature can even begin to right the wrong of an innocent person being killed by society.* There are many more, however:
Threat of the death penalty can frighten an innocent person into signing a false confession. I can’t count how many defendants have told me that interrogating officers said something like "If you don’t admit you did it, you’ll get a lethal injection." Can you imagine how effective that is with a detainee, frightened out of his/her wits, who has been questioned around the clock?
Similarly, fear of the death penalty may push an innocent defendant to accept a plea bargain.
The death penalty is NOT cost effective. The expense of numerous appeals and the cost of keeping prisoners on death row for years is greater than the typical cost of keeping a convicted murderer in prison for fifty years. (We could change that by executing a convicted killer with a bullet to the head an hour after the trial, and making his or her family pay for the bullet, but we are not, thank God, that kind of society.)
Ours is the only leading western nation that still uses the death penalty. This doesn’t help our image in the rest of the world, and makes other nations reluctant to extradite suspects to the United States.
In blunt terms, the death penalty doesn’t serve as a deterrent. Our murder rate is higher than that of any of those other leading western nations, and 3.5 times higher than Italy, the holder of the second-place title on that list. Among states of the U.S. that still have the death penalty, the murder rate per 100,000 people is 5.3, and among non-death penalty states the rate is 2.8, just over half as much.
No doubt some avid death penalty advocates will contact me, quoting Genesis 9:6: "Whoso sheddeth man’s blood by man shall his blood be shed..." I’m not here to promote or dispute anyone’s religion, nor is it my business to debate how the Bible came to be. There are three other points, however, that I believe shouldn’t be ignored: In that same book of the Bible, death at the hands of humanity was not imposed on Cain for killing Abel, and was, in fact, forbidden; a life sentence to prison wasn’t a viable option back then, and; under rules for imposition of the death penalty in Biblical times, it was almost never applied.
It’s long past time to kill the death penalty forever in our nation.
*In a case where the death penalty was imposed on an innocent party because a police officer knowingly coerced a false confession, or a prosecutor knowingly repressed exculpatory evidence, isn’t it logical that the officer or the prosecutor should be charged with attempted murder? If the wrongful conviction is revealed after the innocent party has been put to death, would a charge of murder be inappropriate? If that happened, I wonder how favorably the officer or prosecutor would think of the death penalty.