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Date Posted: 02:27:04 03/06/00 Mon
Author: Anonymous
Subject: BACKGROUND ARTICLE - Sentenced to death in USA-20% were innocent
In reply to: 's message, "Is the Death Penalty okay for PNG even though innocent people will be killed?" on 02:24:33 03/06/00 Mon

Death Penalty Debate at Crossroads

By Geraldine Sealey

March 6 — When Steve Manning became the 13th inmate to walk off Illinois’ death row in January, the implications were chilling. More condemned men had been exonerated than executed in the state in 23 years.

And it turns out the condemned-but-innocent problem isn’t isolated to Illinois. Since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that capital punishment is not “cruel and unusual,” 618 prisoners have been executed across the nation and about 80 have been exonerated.
That’s one person acquitted for every seven killed.
Those disturbing odds beg the question: If the chances of executing an innocent man are so high, should we have capital punishment?
That’s what death-penalty opponents hope pro-execution America is asking itself, and there’s some evidence of a public opinion shift. Although a majority of Americans still support the death penalty, its popularity — 64 percent — stands at its lowest level since 1981, according to a recent ABCNEWS.com poll.
At least five other states are considering execution bans, the U.S. Senate is mulling innocence-protection legislation and the Justice Department is reviewing alleged racial bias in federal death penalty cases. Meanwhile, Benetton clothing ads and movies like The Green Mile stir public debate on the fairness and morality of state-sanctioned killing.
But not all death-penalty supporters are ready to abandon “eye for an eye” just yet.
Where capital punishment foes see a chance to topple the centuries-worn tradition, death-penalty supporters see opportunity for renewed commitment to their cause. Any new reforms, supporters say — such as widespread use of DNA testing and established standards for defense lawyers — will virtually eliminate the argument that the death penalty cannot be fairly applied.

Not Everyone’s Convinced
While you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks it’s OK if innocent people get killed in the process, some death-penalty supporters aren’t convinced wrongful conviction is a widespread problem. Rather, the main problems stem from prosecutorial or police misconduct or incompetent defense lawyers, they say, and the end justifies the means.
“No one is saying all these people were innocent,” says Michael Rushford, president of the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation. “They are saying mistakes were made.”
Rushford says that in a 1989 report — albeit before DNA evidence turned criminal forensics on its head — his group studied 100 death-penalty cases from Alabama, Georgia and Florida and found evidence that just one inmate could be innocent. No evidence has ever proven that anyone executed in America since 1976 was innocent, he added.
Further, death-penalty supporters say, the distressing problems with the Illinois system are anomalous and not representative of the entire nation. Thus, they say other bans on executions are unnecessary.

“California spends a huge amount of money on earthquake-resistant buildings, should that be done in New York?” asked Dudley Sharp of the Houston-based pro-death penalty group Justice for All. “There are no other states that have come close to the alleged problems they have in Illinois.”

‘No Perfect System’
For the record, Florida comes pretty close: 18 inmates have been set free since 1976, while 46 have been executed.
These numbers could be reason enough, says Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, for Americans to finally sound the death knell for capital punishment.
“If the public feels like it’s getting a benefit from the death penalty it will preserve it,” he said. “If it’s one problem after another with the death penalty, they might think, ‘If we can’t have it working maybe we should do away with it.’”
But death-penalty supporters say innocents released from death row are evidence that the appellate process is working, not that it is broken. “There is no perfect system,” Rushford says. “But a system that catches mistakes is doing the job.”
Capital punishment advocates have long accepted that innocent people could possibly be put to death in the criminal justice system. That so many inmates have been freed from death row is not changing everyone’s minds.
“I think one has to begin with the recognition that no human institution or system will ever be perfect,” says Joseph Bessette of Claremont McKenna College. “No one can expect that the system would never make a mistake. If that’s the stand one wants to follow, they shouldn’t support the death penalty.”

Purifying the Debate
But that doesn’t mean death-penalty supporters aren’t willing to support measures that will ensure the guilt of death-row inmates. After all, death-penalty supporters are the first to acknowledge that wrongful convictions hurt their position, not buoy it.
Death-penalty supporters find a lot to like in systematic reforms such as funding DNA databanks that could help prove guilt and innocence to a virtual scientific certainty and testing and bolstering the quality of criminal defense attorneys.
By removing the possibility in many cases that the prosecution got the wrong guy, the discussion over capital punishment will be as pure as it has ever been, execution advocates say. Reforms, they say, will only serve to assuage national fears of executing innocent men.
And although their ultimate goal is to abolish the death penalty, execution foes see no choice now but to push to keep innocent people off death row.


Since 1973, 85 death-row prisoners have been exonerated and freed across the nation. The prisoners spent an average of 7.5 years on death row prior to being released. New DNA evidence played a substantial factor in establishing the innocence of eight freed prisoners. Source: Death Penalty Information Center (ABCNEWS.com/ Magellan Geographix)


The Southern Strategy
There’s no sign that Southerners are rethinking their commitment to capital punishment, even as Illinois has banned executions and at least five other states consider similar measures.
In fact, it seems that the popularity of the death penalty down South has never been healthier. Consider these events of recent weeks:
In Florida, legislators approved a law in January limiting appeals from death-row inmates. Under the law, prisoners would be executed within five years of sentencing. So far, the 85 death-row inmates exonerated across the nation were jailed an average of 7.5 years before new evidence pointed to their innocence. Alabama and Georgia have also followed Texas in pushing for more timely executions.
In Texas, where 210 inmates have been executed since 1976 — more than any other state — Gov. George W. Bush said recently he would not consider a moratorium similar to Illinois.’ Bush said he was certain that no innocent inmates died since he took office in 1995.
Voting on a bill that would abolish the death penalty, the Georgia House recently voted to keep it, 158-15. In 1973, the House vote to revive the death penalty was 154-16. While debating the switch from electrocution to lethal injection, some legislators complained that lethal injection would “sanitize” executions. Others were concerned that the change would lead to another round of appeals, further slowing the execution process.
Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 80 percent of the nation’s 617 executions have taken place in Southern states. In 1998, Alabama sentenced more people to death per capita than any other state in the country, condemning one out of every 161,185 residents to die.
For death penalty abolitionists, the Southern trend is distressing.
“We are having a moment of uneasiness and discomfort in this country on the death penalty and a schizophrenic one,” said Elisabeth Semel of the American Bar Association’s death penalty representation project. “You see what’s going on Illinois and then what’s going on in Florida, Texas, Georgia, and Alabama and you have to shake your head and say, ‘How could that be?’”
But for supporters of the death penalty, speeding the execution process merely ensures justice for crime victims and their families.
“What I hope is that we become like Texas,’’ Brad Thomas, a policy adviser to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, said when the new state law on appeals was passed. “Put them on a gurney and let’s rock and roll.” Thomas later apologized for the remark.

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Replies:

  • bandaid solution -- Anonymous, 19:54:05 03/06/00 Mon
  • Re: bandaid solution for what society -- Anonymous, 20:38:36 03/06/00 Mon
  • early impressions -- Anonymous, 00:57:55 03/07/00 Tue
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