felony murder are executed. However, for various reasons, innocent people can end up on death row. Faulty eyewitness identifications, false testimony”often presented by "Jailhouse snitches" seeking reduced sentences”police misconduct, mishandled evidence, false confessions, inept legal representation, and the personal prejudices of Jurors can lead to wrongful convictions. Contributing to the occurrence of wrongful convictions is the problem of systemic discrimination based on race, class, or social status, many analysts maintain.According to death penalty opponents, the wrongly convicted are often "outsiders"” acial minorities, nonconformists, the poor, the mentally ill, or the mildly retarded” who do not receive equitable treatment in the criminal Justice system.
The mentally incompetent and the poor, in particular, cannot afford their own legal representation and are assigned court-appointed lawyers who are often overworked, inexperienced, or underpaid. Such scenarios make indigent defendants doubly vulnerable in cases in which police or prosecutors have suppressed evidence, critics point out.As Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, states, There is much that remains arbitrary and unfair about the death penalty. " As a result of the widely publicized stories about innocents on death row, American opinion on the death penalty has shifted.
While a majority still support capital punishment, 80 percent of Americans also believe that an innocent person has been executed since 1995, and 63 percent support a suspension of executions until the fairness of capital trials can be determined.Reflecting this growing skepticism about the accuracy of murder convictions, Illinois governor George Ryan proclaimed a emporary moratorium on executions in his state in January 2000. Although he generally supports the death penalty, Ryan became alarmed when he learned that more than half of the condemned inmates in Illinois had been found innocent long after their convictions. In his announcement of the moratorium, Ryan stated, "l cannot support a system which, in its administration, has proven so fraught with error and has come so close to the ultimate nightmare, the state's taking of innocent life.
In 2003, Ryan went one step further: He commuted his state's death sentences to sentences of life without parole. Many death penalty critics agree with Ryan, arguging that the best way to ensure the protection of innocents is to replace the death penalty with the sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole. But death penalty supporters often contend that concerns about executing innocents are mainly the result of biased media coverage.According to attorney Paul Kamenar, there have actually been "very few' cases involving the overturn of a death sentence, and "no case in the last 50 years where an innocent person was executed. " He insists that "the death penalty is working and is orking apparently at 100 percent accuracy.
" Even the fact that death-sentence reversals have occurred, capital punishment supporters point out, reveals the adequacy of existing safeguards against arbitrary mistakes in death penalty cases.For one thing, there is an average of twelve years between conviction and execution, enough time to allow for several appeals. In addition, technological innovations, such as DNA testing, have greatly improved the quality of evidence collection at crime scenes, allowing for more accurate identification of suspects as well as providing exonerating evidence for those who ave been wrongly accused. But death penalty critics maintain that there will never be enough appeals or enough technology to absolve all innocent death-row inmates.As commentator Richard Cohen argues, human error will always be a factor in criminal investigations”which should be enough reason to abolish capital punishment: "To play God .
.. in the face of all we know about human error is an expression of titanic arrogance coupled with a casual indifference to human life....
You can DNA test to your heart's content, provide money for crackerjack lawyers, look every prosecutor in the eye and make im cross his heart, but the innocent will, inevitably and with certainty, die anyway. Many death penalty advocates, however, do not agree that unfairness in the administration of the death penalty nor the possibility of executing innocents Justifies abolishing capital punishment. Some argue that the deterrent effect of the death penalty protects a greater number of innocents than are likely to be lost through wrongful executions. West Point teacher Louis PoJman maintains, for example, that "society has a right to protect itself from capital offenses even if this means taking a inite chance of executing an innocent person.
