Shadows and Doubts

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return. -- W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

"Are you in favor of the death penalty for a person convicted of murder?"

Since the 1980s respondents have answered this question in America with a resounding “yes”.

But what if the question were phrased differently?

Would you be in favor of the death penalty if one innocent person were executed for every 10 guilty ones? How about 1 in 100? 1 in 1,000?

That question is posed in a recent Scientific American article entitled Science versus the Death Penalty.

Last December was a special month for U.S. executions. North Carolina gave a lethal injection to Kenneth Boyd, making him the 1,000th person to be executed since the 1976 Supreme Court decision to allow the reinstatement of the death penalty. Soon thereafter, on December 13, California put to death Crip gang founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams. The U.S. remains the only developed Western nation to permit executions despite serious flaws in the system. No need for any pacificist proclivity or liberal leaning to see that--just look at the science.

Based on a recent University of Michigan study, the article goes on to demonstrate that statistics show that perhaps as many as 1 in 12 innocent people have been executed in America since the Supreme Court decided to allow the reinstatement of the death penalty.

The potential fallibility of deciding capital cases has led some states to review their death-penalty codes and even call for a moratorium while they study the implications of mistakes made in the past.

When Illinois Governor George Ryan halted all executions in his state in 2003, calling the death penalty “arbitrary and capricious”, he not only commuted the sentences of all 157 inmates on the state’s death row, he set in motion a trend that seems to be spreading from coast to coast – a moratorium on the death penalty. His action stemmed from a series of Pulizer Prize newspaper reports by the Chicago Tribune, Restoring Justice.

Today, states such as New Jersey, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan and Minnesota have some kind of moratorium on the death penalty. Many states have already passed legislation to ban juvenile executions and others have introduced reforms concerning DNA testing and other protections to delimit the number of innocent people being caught up in the system.

Besides DNA exonerations in recent years, psychology studies also show that humans can create false memories. And there are other psychological factors that could falsify conclusions reached by prosecutors:

We know that witness testimony can be unreliable, even when it comes from upstanding citizens and not just from co-defendants or jailhouse snitches who have been promised sweet deals. We know that some personality types are more likely to yield to the pressures to confess--and that these people do so just to please their interrogators or to avoid harsh treatment.

Hollywood films have often dealt with death-penalty themes, as in the well-know television series and film, The Fugitive, where an innocent man is condemned to death for a crime he never committed. Other films that explore the fallibility of capital punishment include The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case and Crime of the Century. The pro-death-penalty film, Vigilante, suggests that not having the death penalty in society could lead to actions of revenge on the part of private citizens.

This site presents an array of films dealing with capital punishment. Arguments in favor of the DP can be found at the Pro Death Penalty Site. Other useful resources include DP Statistics, DP statistics & inter-national links, Alternatives to DP and a surprising opponent of the DP, Why this FBI agent is against DP.

Sometimes the emotional side of the issue overwhelms the empirical evidence on both sides of the equation. Rabid officials who believe religiously in an eye for an eye may even go out of their way to keep an ageing, apparently dying prisoner alive in order to go through the killing ritual. Revenge rears its ugly head.

Although America is the only democratic nation in the world that still maintains the death penalty, within the country it remains a controversial social issue, with dedicated opponents and proponents. The moral arguments for and against capital punishment may seem equally compelling, but the scientific facts point to one overriding reason for doing away with the death penalty: the likelihood of innocent people being executed.



Technorati tags:
Commentary, Death_Penalty, DNA , Revenge