The Innocence Project, a nonprofit legal clinic that works to exonerate the wrongly convicted, lists on its Web site 172 DNA exonerations since 1989, including two Texans pardoned for actual innocence last month by Gov. Rick Perry: Entre Nax Karage, who served seven years of a life sentence for murder, and Keith E. Turner, who served four years of a 20-year sentence for aggravated sexual assault.
Somewhere in between the arguments for and against capital punishment lies a growing unease with one of the growing problems with executing convicted criminals. No one has ever claimed that our judicial system is infallible…so what happens when an innocent person is convicted of capital murder and eventually executed? Must our system for executing criminals be infallible when any reasonable person recognizes that our judicial system is not? And if we accept the idea of fallibility, is there any acceptable error rate? Is the occasional execution of an innocent person an acceptable cost of doing business when it comes to protecting society from murderers? Does “an eye for an eye” work even when an individual is required to pay the ultimate price for a crime he or she may not have committed?
Given the slipshod, haphazard, and highly political manner in which the death penalty is applied in this country, it defies credibility to think that somewhere along the line a mistake hasn’t been made and an innocent person executed. As more states are beginning to recognize and come to grips with this reality, governments are beginning to wonder if “acceptable error rates” is even something a civilized people should be discussing when it comes to the death penalty.
Polls show most Americans support the death penalty, but their support is waning. That decline, from 80 percent in 1994 to around 64 percent now, is attributed to the frequency with which legal aid organizations have used DNA testing to prove miscarriages of justice….
State lawmakers also are beginning to doubt the infallibility of capital justice. New Jersey legislators passed a moratorium on that state’s criminal executions pending a review of the costs and fairness of application. Acting Gov. Richard J. Codey signed the bill Jan. 12 before leaving office.
Nowhere does this question ring truer than it does here in Texas. Though a majority of Texans are satisified with the status quo, I can’t help but wonder if this would continue to be the case if Texans understood the sloppiness and the craven political nature of the way the death penalty is administered in this state.
Harris County is the death penalty capital of the US. With the exposure of the sloppiness of work done by the country’s crime lab over the past few years, it doesn’t take an intellectual giant to wonder how many of the country’s death penalty cases may have been made based upon tainted, inaccurate, or even fabricated evidence. That remains an open question, and one that is still being investigated, but the possibility that Harris County, in it’s rush to final justice, may be responsible for the execution of innocent people should give any thinking person chills.
Texas is not considering a moratorium on executions, but it should. This state’s death row holds 410 prisoners; 19 were executed last year. That represented nearly a third of all U.S. executions in 2005. Yet the guilt of a number of Texas capital offenders, including one juvenile offender already put to death, is in dispute….
Death row inmate Anthony Graves was convicted of murder primarily on the testimony of a man who recanted many times over before Graves was executed in 2000 for his role in the crime. Ruben Cantu, executed in 1993, was 17 at the time of the murder for which he received the death penalty. Like Graves’, Cantu’s conviction was based almost purely on the now-recanted testimony of one man….
It remains to be seen how many of those convictions might have been tainted by the shoddy work of Houston Police Department crime lab investigators.
And what if some were? What if it turns out that capital murder convictions have been obtained based on tainted evidence? What if it turns out that innocent people have been put to death based on evidence that is just plain wrong?
If we are going to apply the “final solution” as a means of punishment, we must recognize that if it turns out a mistake was made, there is no bringing back the dead. The “oops, our bad” argument is hardly going to work on a family that has lost a husband, brother, or father.
I believe that when it comes to capital punishment, we, in order to protect our humanity, MUST demand perfection. If we cannot achieve it, then we must err on the side of caution. The reality is that there is, nor should there be, any “acceptable” error rate when it comes to the death penalty. If one innocent person is executed, then society becomes complicit in murder, the very act that those who support the death penalty argue that capital punishment deters.
What, really, is so wrong with the idea of life without parole? What harm does is do to society to err on the side of caution? IF we could devise a system that allowed the death penalty to be applied without the possibility of mistakes being made, THEN perhaps we could (and should) revisit this argument. Human nature being nothing if not fallible, though, there is no way to expect that human fallibility can ever be drilled out of the system. This argument alone should be reason enough to scrap the death penalty. When a highly fallible and demonstrably imperfect legal system is playing God, we have a recipe for disaster on our hands. It’s time that states and the federal government recognized this reality and declared a permanent moratorium on the death penalty.
