Capital punishment, fatally flawed

www.baltimoresun. com/news/ opinion/editoria l/bal-ed. death25sep25, 0,7205849. story
baltimoresun. comCapital punishment, fatally flawedOur view: Maryland's death
penalty should be replaced by life without parole

September 25, 2008

In a democracy, there can be no greater miscarriage of justice than the
execution of an innocent person. Yet this week, the state of Georgia came
frighteningly close to that possibility in the case of Troy A. Davis, a
death row inmate awaiting execution for the 1989 killing of a Savannah
police officer. His conviction was based almost entirely on the statements
of nine purported eyewitnesses, seven of whom later recanted their
testimony. Mr. Davis was only hours from execution when the U.S. Supreme
Court granted a temporary stay.

By coincidence, the court's action came on the same day Maryland's death
penalty commission held its final public hearing. The panel listened as
experts testified that the state's death penalty is deeply flawed. Among
those testifying was lawyer Patrick Kent, chief of the forensics unit in the
state public defender's office, who said even the best crime-solving science
is fallible: "The only way we can say we are not executing the innocent is
simply not to execute."

There is widespread agreement among law enforcement officials, prosecutors,
defense attorneys and legal scholars that capital punishment does not deter
crime, that it is unfair, arbitrary and capricious in its application and
that it protects the public no better than a life without parole
sentence.Some of the most compelling testimony to the Maryland commission
came from James P. Abbott, a New Jersey police chief who was once a strong
supporter of capital punishment but changed his mind after studying the
issue as a member of a similar panel in New Jersey. He now "unequivocally"
opposes the death penalty, even in cases involving the killing of police
officers. Asked what he would say to the family of a slain officer, he
admitted to a loss for words: "I don't know what you tell the family," he
said.

It was an honest response to a painful dilemma. Yet Mr. Abbott's answer
would have been equally true had the question been asked the other way
around: What does one say to the family of an innocent person wrongly
executed by the state? Perhaps to some questions there simply are no good
answers. But that doesn't make retaining the death penalty an acceptable
alternative.

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