-Harry Blackmun Justice of the Supreme Court
Bobby has laid out several arguments in favor of the death penalty, specifically in Texas.
The death penalty, once carried out, is obviously irreversible. If new forensics technology or new evidence arises that may prove a prisoner’s innocence after his execution, there’s no “taking it back”.
The very idea of executing innocent people is the strongest argument against the death penalty, in my opinion. Bobby’s statement that “There is no conclusive evidence that any of these people were innocent.” is at best, misleading and I believe, highly inaccurate.
There is indeed ample evidence that innocent men and women have been sent to death row, some executed before they were exonerated. Take the case of Ruben Cantu
Cantu, executed despite no physical evidence linking him to the crime, and no witnesses who could have provided an alibi were interviewed. The lone eyewitness has recanted, claiming police pressure to identify Cantu.
Or the case of “>Cameron T. Willingham. Of two extremely similar cases of murder by arson,
The report says that prosecution witnesses in both cases interpreted fire indicators like cracked glass and burn marks as evidence that the fires had been set, when more up-to-date technology shows that the indicators could just as well have signified an accidental fire. In one case, the signs were accepted as proof of guilt, the report said; in the other, they were discarded as misleading. "These two outcomes are mutually exclusive," Mr. Scheck said. "Willis cannot be found 'actually innocent' and Willingham executed based on the same scientific evidence."
Beyond those, we have the long term study by James S. Liebman, a Professor of Law at the Columbia Law School. This is as summarized by Death Penalty Information Center
High error rates put people at risk of wrongful execution. 82% of the people whose capital judgments were overturned by state post-conviction courts due to serious error were found to deserve a sentence less than death when the errors were cured on retrial. 7% were found to be innocent of the capital crime.
Beyond that, what about questions of due process, or of race being a factor in death penalty cases? Again, as quoted by the Death Penalty research center: “"In 82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i.e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks."
- United States General Accounting Office, Death Penalty Sentencing, February 1990”
Or as the NACDL says:
“The [Texas Court of Criminal Appeals] also upheld at least three death sentences in a Houston case in which the lawyer for the defendant slept during the trial.”
Like the case of Calvin Burdine who at one point “[came] within hours of execution”.
The Texas Governor can be the court of "last resort" in these cases, claimed as another check on the innocent or the undeserving being executed. But take the tenure of Governor Bush, who “[spent] between 15 and 30 minutes on each case” (San Jose Mercury News via Common Dreams
“Judge Al Gonzales, who was Bush's legal counsel for the governor's first 59 executions, says Bush would typically spend about a half hour on each of the cases.”
via Salon
I could rail against the death penalty as barbaric, as a avenue for revenge, but I’d rather let the facts speak for themselves.
When the mistakes are irreversible, we cannot afford there to be a single flaw in this system. A flawless process is clearly not in place, and innocent people die because of it.
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