Why is death penalty wrong

As long as the death penalty is in place, we risk executing an innocent person. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, death row inmates have been exonerated since The state of Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham in despite strong evidence of his innocence. In , Illinois Governor George Ryan placed a moratorium on the penalty after 13 men had been exonerated from death row since The cost of capital punishment is extraordinary.

If those sentenced to death received life sentences instead, we accomplish the same deterrent effect of the death penalty: criminals remain off the streets for the rest of their lives. The money saved could be spent on improving the criminal justice system, such as increasing public safety or providing resources to help prevent wrongful convictions. In November of , California voters passed Proposition 66, a measure to expedite the death penalty process.

Three years later, in , Governor Gavin Newsom announced a moratorium on capital punishment just months after his inauguration. The executive order ends all death penalty sentences from being carried out throughout his tenure as Governor. EJI provides legal assistance to people on death row, many of whom are innocent or wrongly convicted. We provide representation at trial, on appeal, and in postconviction proceedings to people facing execution.

We have documented widespread racial bias in the administration of the death penalty and we challenge racial discrimination in jury selection, sentencing, and throughout the system. We protect vulnerable people facing execution, including people with mental illness who are uniquely at risk, and we produce reports about capital punishment and the ways in which public safety can be undermined by relying on this expensive and flawed punishment.

For every nine people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated. The same factors drive wrongful convictions in non-capital cases and death penalty cases, including:. A record exonerations in involved witnesses who lied on the stand or falsely accused the defendant.

In 50 of these cases, the defendant was falsely accused of a crime that never happened. Official misconduct is more common in death penalty cases, especially if the defendant is Black. The intense pressure to obtain a death sentence and the political stakes for police, prosecutors, and even judges can cause serious legal errors that contribute to wrongful convictions and death sentences. In Alabama alone, over death sentences have been invalidated by state and federal courts, resulting in conviction of a lesser offense or a lesser sentence on retrial.

Inadequate legal assistance, racial bias, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence make Mr. The failure to provide adequate counsel to capital defendants and people sentenced to death is a defining feature of the American death penalty. Whether a defendant will be sentenced to death typically depends on the quality of his legal team more than any other factor.

Some lawyers provide outstanding representation to capital defendants. But few defendants facing capital charges can afford to hire an attorney, so they are appointed lawyers who are frequently overworked, underpaid, and inexperienced in trying death penalty cases. Capital cases are especially complex, time-intensive, and financially draining. Lawyers representing indigent capital defendants often face enormous caseloads, caps on fees, and a critical lack of resources for investigation and expert assistance.

Too often they fail to adequately investigate cases, call witnesses, and challenge forensic evidence. Capital defense l awyers have slept through parts of trial, shown up in court intoxicated, or done no work to prepare for sentencing. Inadequate defense lawyers contribute to wrongful convictions and death sentences, and by failing to object at trial, they make it harder to correct errors on appeal.

That leaves people sentenced to death with little hope for relief in postconviction proceedings, where they have to present new evidence and navigate complicated procedural rules. By , court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings for the first time. Two-thirds of people executed in the s were Black, and the trend continued.

Georgia , U. A decade later, the Court considered statistical evidence presented in McCleskey v. Kemp showing that Georgia defendants were more than four times as likely to be sentenced to death if the murder victim was white than if the victim was Black. Kemp , U. More than 8 in 10 lynchings between and and legal executions since have occurred in the South. Race still influences who is sentenced to death and executed in America today.

The data in Georgia has actually gotten worse: people convicted of killing white victims are 17 times more likely to be executed than those convicted of killing Black victims. Related Report. Nearly years after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of to eliminate racial discrimination in jury selection, people of color continue to be excluded from jury service because of their race.

Having received an honorable discharge, he stayed in Arizona and went to work for the U. Postal Service, a job he planned to keep until retirement. The day after her body was discovered, Krone was ordered to provide blood, saliva, and hair samples. A dental cast of his teeth also was created. The next day he was arrested and charged with aggravated murder.

As was the case with Ajamu, there was no forensic evidence linking Krone to the crime. DNA was a fairly new science, and none of the saliva or blood collected at the crime scene was tested for DNA. Simpler blood, saliva, and hair tests were inconclusive. He was sentenced to death. I had served my country in uniform. I worked for the post office. This discrepancy in resources available to prosecutors and defendants in capital cases has long been replicated across the nation, leading to predictable outcomes for defendants staked to under-resourced and often ineffective legal counsel.

Krone got a new trial in , when an appeals court ruled that prosecutors had wrongly withheld a videotape of the bite evidence until the day before the trial. Again, he was found guilty. But this time the sentencing judge ruled that a life sentence was appropriate, not death. They mortgaged their house, and the family hired their own lawyer to look into the physical evidence collected during the original investigation.

A man named Kenneth Phillips, who lived less than a mile from the bar where Ancona was killed, had left his DNA on clothes Ancona had been wearing. Phillips was easy to find: He already was in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a seven-year-old girl. Gary Drinkard was no choirboy. When I spoke with Drinkard, he reminded me of a weather-beaten man straight out of a Merle Haggard song.

He wore coveralls and chain-smoked Newports. He spoke slowly and guardedly in a deep southern drawl. He grew exasperated only when I asked him to describe his time on death row.

That certainly seemed to be the plan. Drinkard was found guilty in and sentenced to death. He would spend close to six years on death row. It provided him with legal counsel.

A county jury found Drinkard not guilty within one hour, and he was released. There have been more than 2, exonerations overall in the U. In Kirk Bloodsworth was the first person in the nation to be exonerated from death row based on DNA evidence.

Bloodsworth was arrested in and charged with raping and murdering Dawn Hamilton, a nine-year-old girl, near Baltimore, Maryland. Police were alerted to Bloodsworth, who had just moved to the area, when an anonymous tipster reported him after seeing a televised police sketch of the suspect. Bloodsworth bore little resemblance to the suspect in the police sketch. No physical evidence linked him to the crime. Yet Bloodsworth was convicted and sentenced to death based primarily on the testimony of five witnesses, including an eight-year-old and a year-old, who said they could place him near the murder scene.

Witness misidentification is a factor in many wrongful convictions, according to the DPIC. He was granted a second trial nearly two years later, after it was shown on appeal that prosecutors had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from his defense, namely that police had identified another suspect but failed to pursue that lead.

Again, Bloodsworth was found guilty. A different sentencing judge handed Bloodsworth two life sentences, rather than death. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison. That book, The Blooding, describes the then emerging science of DNA testing and how law enforcement had first used it to both clear suspects and solve a rape and murder case.

When he asked whether DNA evidence could be tested to prove that he was not at the crime scene, he was told the evidence had been destroyed inadvertently. Prosecutors, sure of their case, agreed to release the items. It would be almost another decade before the actual killer was charged. Today Bloodsworth is the executive director of WTI and a tireless campaigner against capital punishment.

Sabrina Butler discovered that Walter, her nine-month-old son, had stopped breathing shortly before midnight on April 11, An year-old single mother, Butler responded with urgent CPR. When the child could not be revived after several minutes, she raced him to a hospital in Columbus, Mississippi, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Less than 24 hours later she was charged with murder. Walter had serious internal injuries when he died. Butler told police investigators she believed that the injuries were caused by her efforts to revive him.

Eleven months later Butler was convicted of murder and sentenced to die. All that I had been told by my attorneys was to sit quietly and look at the jury. A new trial was ordered.