By Brendan Raleigh
Round Table reporter
As of October 2010, there were over 3,000 inmates onAmerica’s death row. While most states, as well as most Americans, support capital punishment, the policy’s shortcomings severely outweigh its merits.
An institution with such broad disparities in its application, one-tenth of its intended victims’ eventual exoneration, and the financially preferable alternative of lifelong incarceration has no place in a modern, civilized society. Aside from providing temporary comfort to grieving families, the majority of the death penalty’s beneficial aspects are negligible at best, and fallacious at worst.
The first and most obvious flaw of the death penalty lies in is its irreversibility and finality. While time lost serving a prison sentence cannot be regained, the remainder of the sentence need not be served once an inmate’s innocence has been proven.
Execution, on the other hand, leaves no room for error on the part of the justice system. Though most rulings will, undoubtedly, be correct, the chance of an incorrect ruling is great enough to endanger innocent lives. Misleading evidence, falsified testimonies, or even a particularly ineffective defense attorney could mean the difference between life and death for a defendant.
Perhaps even worse than the loss of life is the defacement of a blameless person’s legacy, as was the case for Johnny Garrett: a 17-year-old wrongfully convicted of the rape and murder of a nun, Sister Tadea Benz. Garrett may have been proved innocent thanks to the modern application of DNA typing, but not before the death and embarrassment of Garrett and his entire family.
While the inclusion of DNA evidence was instrumental in the posthumous exoneration of others like Garrett, it cannot be used as a cure-all for the problems in the legal system.
Obviously, DNA testing can only be used when DNA can still be found at the crime scene: a requirement often unable to be fulfilled. It is also a costly expense whenever it can be used. Using DNA typing may decrease the chance of error, but it is neither a definitive nor affordable solution to the discrepancies so prevalent in the allocation of capital punishment.
In addition to factual misrepresentations, verdicts are also subject to the preconceived notions and personal biases of the jurors. The distribution of the death penalty among races, for example, is skewed heavily towards blacks. Over 40 percent of death row inmates are African-American, yet only 13 percent of American citizens are African Americans.
A 2003 study done by theUniversity ofMaryland found the death penalty to have been more commonly sought in cases involving both a white victim and a black offender.
Though blacks are statistically more likely to commit murders than whites, this data shows the choice of punishment for murder to have been consistently more severe when used against African-Americans than with whites.
The Supreme Court even acknowledged the disproportionate use of the death penalty in McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), yet refused to declare it “cruel or unusual” under the Eighth Amendment because the court believed inconsistencies to be inevitable in the justice system.
This would only be acceptable if the statistics presented could be seen as incidental; they were not. The study, published by David C. Baldus of theUniversityofIowa, found that those accused of murdering whites were 4.3 times more likely to receive the death penalty than those who had killed blacks. To call such incongruity “inconclusive” or “incidental” is foolish.
Baldus’s study may have been conducted over 20 years ago, but the racist sentiments observed in it can still be found in modernAmerica. Duane Buck, a black man previously scheduled for lethal injection in September 2011, recently had his execution date reaffirmed by the Supreme Court.
This is in spite of a psychologist Walter Quijano’s allegation that Buck’s race “increases the future dangerousness for various complicated reasons” during the hearing. Whether or not this statement affected the jury’s decision cannot be known, but the judge’s permittance of such vague and unfounded testimony suggests that he found Quijano’s statement to be within the bounds of reality: a dangerous mindset for the man who would eventually sentence Buck to death.
With the decline of both state and federal budgets, politicians are desperate to make cuts in any area able to afford them. While the decision as to whether or not convicted murderers deserve execution should certainly be based on justice rather than economic value, the monetary advantages of abolishing the death penalty are surprisingly concrete, and should not be ignored.
Attempting to put an accused killer on death row, for example, sends the defense into a raging fit of desperation, costing the state time and money just to get a conviction.
In combination with expensive lethal chemicals, DNA testing, and the obstructions placed by a legal system largely uninterested in actually carrying out the death penalty, the whole concept seems ineffective even when technically in place.
California, for example, has an average wait of 20 years before an inmate is executed and spends $90 thousand more per year on those sentenced to death than those who are not. Even the most ardent proponents of the death penalty must admit these to be inexcusable wastes of taxpayer dollars.
The strongest case for the death penalty is its alleged role as a deterrent of crime; however, almost every study available on the subject suggests the contrary. NorthwesternUniversitySchoolof Law’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology showed that 88 percent of the criminologists surveyed did not find the death penalty to be a significant deterrent of homicide.
Statistics collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that, as of September 2000, 10 out of 12 states without capital punishment had homicide rates lower than the national average.
Life in prison is no less a deterrent of crime than execution, as it should be equally as threatening, when taking into account the poor state of many U.S. prisons. One who would prefer the company of other murderers, thieves, and rapists in squalid, unsanitary conditions to death is not in full comprehension of how long a life-sentence is.
Another illogical argument for the death penalty is the idea that it provides closure for the victim’s family. While this is likely true in many cases, the murderer, regardless of how evil he or she may be, cannot be sacrificed for the temporary satisfaction of a family. The accused is equally as likely to have a family as the victim, causing the mere relocation of the misery rather than the destruction of it.
The death penalty has clearly outlived its use in American society. It is morally, logically, and even economically inferior when compared to a lifelong sentence. Allowing capital punishment to remain in place simultaneously allows for the interference of human emotions and errors in the legal process, two possibilities which cannot be permitted when discussing the potential execution of a fellow human being.
