Pausing to reconsider

by Darryl Wilkinson

Some want to make the death penalty an issue as we prepare to vote for our next president. George Bush is being re-examined in light of his own death-penalty politics as governor of Texas. That state routinely uses capital punishment. It has been reported that Texas has conducted its 19th execution of the year already with more scheduled. There have been 132 executions in Texas during the 5-year Bush gubernatorial era. Thus last month, when Bush gave convicted killer Ricky Nolan McGinn a 30-day reprieve from lethal injection, charges of playing politics were voiced about George Bush’s sudden compassion.

This issue deserves more study than just the political aspects. There is growing concern over whether innocent people have been put to death, prompting many — including this newspaper which has supported capital punishment in the past — to rethink the matter. Scientific advances in DNA testing have raised doubts about some homicide convictions. The governor of Illinois imposed a moratorium on capital punishment after 13 death row inmates were exonerated.

Now comes a detailed study by a Columbia University law professor and two assistants. From their study on U.S. death sentences issued between 1973 and 1995, more than two-thirds were overturned on appeal. Then, when new trials or resentencings occurred, more than four of every five drew something other than a death sentence. This isn’t a slam against the judicial system because sometimes such errors are discovered only when appeals courts rule on questions never previously litigated in the cases. But the more significant finding from the study — which should give any thoughtful person pause — was that one in every 14 persons facing a death penalty was judged not guilty.

The study also reports that only about 5 percent of those sentenced to death during the study time period were eventually executed. That may prompt death-penalty advocates to say the system works, that those executed are only those where there are no doubts. But try arguing that one with the one from the 14 freed from facing the gallows, to say nothing of those who may have been executed or were guilty but legitimately entitled to a lesser punishment!

The taking of lives by government threatens and challenges the most basic concepts of our society. An execution is society’s way of stating zero tolerance for certain actions by an individual. Shouldn’t we demand zero tolerance concerning errors in doling out such punishment? This certainly does not exist now.

In the very least, we need to make post-conviction DNA testing the norm for death-row inmates in older cases in which their trials predated the technology. The results from this step, more than university studies and politics, might help us focus more on whether we should continue with capital punishment. Our support of the death penalty begins to falter whenever our judicial system uses anything less than every means possible to assure that no innocent person is executed. –dw