As a pro-bono research investigator for the wrongfully convicted, I have more than sufficient reason and experience to argue against the death penalty. I have independently researched information for The Innocence Project and other defense counsel. I have likewise contributed findings to several U.S. Attorneys and the FBI Laboratory. The depositions and evidence of wrongdoing presented to various participants in capital cases stand in condemnation of a system of punishment that is all too often in error. This essay will provide a succinct and compelling argument against capital punishment wherever it is used, regardless of a defendant’s guilt or innocence.
When capital crime, such as treason, pre-meditated murders, some arson, murder-for-hire, and other serious crimes take place, there are many events that happen within the first few hours. Almost the entire subsequent turn of events can hinge on how the initial crime scene process is carried out. It is true that the evidence tells the story. Problems occur when there is a rush to judgment and existing evidence is used to fit a foregone, often erroneous, conclusion of guilt. There is temptation to not investigate every aspect fully, especially when the “good guys” feel they have a solid case and enough evidence, albeit circumstantial. Follow this with a forced or coerced confession, poor defense counsel, an ambitious prosecutor, and corrupt practices with regard to the turning over of exculpatory evidence. Thus, a human life hangs in the balance of what becomes a sophisticated game of Us vs. Them (us being the prosecution and them being the defense). In fact, there are too many such cases sitting in a number of death row cells as I write this. I have met my share. I have been rewarded when a person is exonerated at the eleventh hour, and I have played some tiny part in the delicate rebalancing of the Scales of Justice. Sometimes a guilty party is given an alternate sentence of life without the possibility of parole. This, too, is a victory. The guilty remain incarcerated, justice is served and another execution is cancelled.
To quote you cases of exonerated innocents is not the purpose or the task of this essay. It is, rather, to provide enough data for you to realize that if one innocent person is executed, the whole system has failed gravely in its performance. One of the first lessons in law school is that it is always best to err in favor of the defendant.
The defendant who has eye witnesses (verification), the same shoe prints (evidence), and an earlier altercation (motive) is well on the way to execution. To precede this with a confession that was obtained by giving false information to the defendant, or using other psychological games solely to obtain a conviction, is patently a corruption of justice. There are cases where some detail that would exonerate a defendant is left out, hidden, or otherwise not turned over to the defense. You must know that the keeper of all evidence in any case is the prosecutor’s department. The defense must rely on the honesty and integrity of the prosecution. In a high stakes election year, to pick up a lagging career, to gain fame as a star prosecutor or to add a “notch” to one’s win record; there is all too often foul play. This can go so far as to involve forensic laboratories, crime scene specialists, and even the FBI.
More disheartening is the brutal reality that the poor, minorities and those whose defense is wholly inadequate are more likely to be sentenced to death than a better educated, mainstream, Caucasian who has greater wherewithal to obtain a good defense.
The old maxim, “an eye for an eye” is sometimes brought up as justification for the death penalty. However, that biblical measurement for revenge or payback, if you will, was intended as a limit on the amount of revenge one could take. That is, one cannot take a head for a tooth or an arm for a leg. The objective was to control the retribution. One might argue that it is then a life for a life. Since the bible establishes that God is the Giver of life, then it would seem rather contradictory that He who gives life would allow His creation (humankind) free rein to take it as they see fit. Added to that, the Ten Commandments stipulates clearly on the taking of life through murder. What then is execution if not legalized murder?
Certainly it has been proved at various times that capital punishment is not a deterrent to crime overall. It certainly is a deterrent to future commission of crime by one individual (i.e., the one who is executed.) To carry out a legal act of punishment upon a wrongfully convicted person, however, violates all that defines us as a civilized and highly evolved society. It is quite sufficiently primitive to use capital punishment at all—especially in view of the fact that we now have more than adequate methods of warehousing some criminals for life without release.
Another strong argument in favor of lifetime incarceration is the cost of an execution. It costs far more to kill a person by a death sentence than to feed and house that individual for the remainder of natural life. This is true for those convicted who are factually guilty of the crimes for which they are accused. In other words, there are no sound arguments in favor of capital punishment, because one must support that all facets of the arrest, trial, conviction, and punishment are faultless and flawless.
ANTI-THESIS
Capital Punishment Should Continue
It is true that some countries still approve and use the death penalty as their primary deterrent to heinous crimes. The successful argument is that other would-be capital offenders are discouraged in the commission of crime because of the fate of someone else. The only deterrent achieved however, is that one specific individual will absolutely no longer commit a similar crime. Equally true is that life without parole or possibility of parole guarantees the same result.
Isaac Ehrlich posits in “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death” (2009):
“…the verification or estimation of the magnitude of the deterrent effect of the death penalty—the determination of the expected tradeoff between the execution of a murderer and the lives of potential victims it may help save—can, in turn, influence evaluation of its overall desirability as a social instrument even if that evaluation is largely subjective.
Is it true that minorities and the impoverished receive a less brilliant defense? It may be that some minorities have great support from cultural and political sources to look out for the best interest of the defendant, guilty or not. These issues are still hotly contested. Combs and Comer (1982) substantiate in their study that debate over capital punishment has remained a divisional issue between blacks and white throughout the sixties and seventies. I would add that this is still a factor in the twenty-first century.
A crime scene is meticulously kept, the evidence gathered by procedure, and the lawyers on both sides are responsible, engaging persons whose careers are in good stead. They present their case well, and a conviction is rendered from a jury of peers. The loser here is, of course, the defendant, but also the defense team. Let us assume furthermore that the defendant is, in fact, guilty of the crime for which he was tried. Execution is legal and that is the sentence. The costs involved in carrying it out are well beyond anything feasible. Execution is not an easy end of the line. Costs really get interesting when the appeals process starts and often does go on for several years. Our legal system enjoys the Constitutional benefit of habeas corpus. This means the accused has ample opportunity to get the sentence reduced to life, or to argue for special circumstances thereby lessening the original severity of the crime. It might be a case of Joe factually killing Jim with a crowbar, but after ten hours of harassment by Jim, causing Joe to lose control of his actions. Thus, the process continues. Following two or three rounds of appeals, our defendant is now on death row for several years. The appeals have been lost and now the date of execution is growing close. An entire new process begins and it is, in itself, an industry. There is a special team, a chaplain, psychological counseling, and rehearsals. There are many tests of the equipment to be used to carry out the final payment for crime. There are family issues, sometimes involving even the victim’s family. The witnesses to the execution are mustered and briefed. The execution is a well-oiled machine.
In many court cases, the oratory on both sides frequently cites Biblical passages establishing the right to life and to take life. The image of an indignant God demanding temporal punishment is one of many aspects of support of capital punishment. Robert L. Young (1988) has written about his research addressing the relationship of religion and race toward attitudes about the death penalty. His survey suggests that some faiths (particularly the fundamentalist and evangelist) have significant but very different functions in the attitudes about capital punishment. The race of the religious adherent also altered the survey analysis. It was opined that more research inclusive of sub-groups was warranted.
SYNTHESIS
The Facts Weigh In Heavily
There is little if any resolution to the ongoing debate of capital punishment. There are those of religious fervor on both sides of the fence. There are factions among minorities and whites that disagree with the mechanics of capital punishment. There have been arguments even on the grounds that it is cruel and inhuman because the execution process is painful, even if just, and should be halted on that cause alone.
Cost is clearly established as a contributing factor to abolishing the death penalty. For something to cost into the seven-digit figures, especially when it might be administered to an innocent person, strengthens the anti-death penalty position.
Religion, over all, neither wins nor loses this debate. However, it was established by Unnever, Cullen and Bartkowski (2006) that those with a close personal relationship to God were unlikely to favor the death penalty.
Returning to Isaac Ehrlich (2009), the thrust of his research is the “multi-faceted opposition to capital punishment which must rely upon ethical and aesthetic considerations.” Ehrlich recognized the risk of errors that are present in a legal system. These errors can be caused or aggravated by all of the things mentioned earlier. It is a logical conclusion that errors where capital punishment are concerned cannot be appealed or reversed. The only justice at that point would be posthumously won.
The media has touted the fact that the United States leads the world in prison population. With five percent of the world’s population, the U.S. warehouses approximately twenty-five percent of the total number of prisoners in the world. It logically concludes that the great number of prisoners have truly not been presumed innocent. A 1992 National Law Journal poll revealed that twenty-eight percent of jurors believed that if a case gets to the trial stage, the defendant is “probably guilty.” They simply do not believe that our system would go to all that trouble if someone were innocent.
Salerno (2009) states appropriately that our system of crime and punishment have not changed for “several millennia.” He further explains that our ideas of good and evil may be “unsuited to a world where abuses of power can have an apocalyptic reach in impact.”
I have been privileged to be included in specific research on behalf of incarcerated persons that proved their innocence. Some of these are certainly not choirboys, but they are human beings who spent years living mere steps away from an execution chamber and who were not guilty of the crime for which they were convicted. Others of these wrongfully convicted were just ordinary people like you and me, going about their business, when one day they are thrust into a nightmare of phenomenal proportions. To have finally met these persons, sixteen of them, in fact, was a tremendous event for me. These were all “dead men walking” only a couple of months or years before I knew them. We all met at the First Conference on the Wrongfully Convicted held at Northwestern University downtown Chicago campus on a brisk November weekend. The Innocence Project was center stage at this conference. I realized that helping in this endeavor was something I would do whenever called upon. One person had received a stay of execution four times. That is four times preparing to die. What an outrage when innocent.
Salerno (2009) rightly avers that confessions are among several categories of evidence, once the keystone of any case. Recently technology has presented challenges to this form of resolving a case. Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld founded the Innocence Project in 1992. It has used DNA evidence to clear sixteen convicts awaiting execution and more than 235 other prisoners; many of them had made self-incriminating statements, signed actual confessions, or accepted plea agreements. The methods of procuring these so called confessions are topics for another time.
This sums up why I oppose the use of the death penalty and support only the maximum sentence of life without possibility of parole. I urge you to research the topic yourself. Seek out and speak with those who have been vindicated. Contact the Innocence Project and get informed.
There is nothing so horrible as the execution of an innocent person. When it happens, it is a black mark upon all of us. It can never be recalled. There are no other chances for an executed person. Justice is not served; it is mocked. The victim is not avenged; another one joins him. Until you have looked at evidence once thought hidden, or discovered intentional and/or sloppy investigative work, you cannot know the impact of it all. Looking into the eyes of innocence preparing to die by lethal injection, gas chamber or electric chair, is to say “No more!” to a punishment that does not serve the public interest or the conscience of a moral nation.
References
Combs, M. W., & Comer, J. C. (1982). Race and capital punishment; a longitudinal analysis. Phylon, 43(4), 350-359. doi:http://www.jstor.org/stable/274757
Cullen, F.T., Fisher, B.S., Applegate, B.K. (2000). Public opinion about punishment and corrections. Crime and Justice, 27, 1-79.
Ehrlich, I. (1975, June). The deterrent effect of capital punishment: a question of life and death. The American Economic Review, 65(3), 397-417. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1804842.
Salerno, S. (2009). The flaws and fallacies of the American justice system. Skeptic, 15(1), 34-42.
Tyler, T. R., & Weber, R. (1982). Support for the death penalty; instrumental response to crime, or symbolic attitude? Law and Society Review 21, 1982-83, 17(1), 1. Retrieved from Heinonline.org.
Unnever, J. D., Cullen, F. T., & Bartkowski, J. P. (2006). Images of God and public support for capital punishment: does a close relationship with God matter? Criminology - American Society of Criminology, 44(4), 835-866.
Young, R. L. (1992). Religious orientation, race and support for the death penalty. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 31(1), 76-87.
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