The Death Penalty? Still? Really?



Stephen Markley on 09.14.09

How does this country still have a death penalty? Besides being
morally repugnant, capital punishment is a monumentally bad idea --
an arbitrarily applied punishment that mostly nets minorities and the
poor.

The U.S. and Japan are the last industrial democracies in the world
to still use the death penalty. In fact, the only countries that
execute more of their own citizens than we do are China, Iran, and
Pakistan (occasionally Saudi Arabia beats us too). What awesome company.
Furthermore, a fantastic organization called the Innocence Project
has spent a lot of time and money over the years proving that
innocent people get caught up in our criminal justice system and sent
to death row. Through DNA testing, they have exonerated 241 people
post-conviction, 17 of which were death row inmates on their way to
the needle.

Now it appears as if death penalty opponents have what I long thought
would bring this debate to a close: the execution of an innocent person.

Cameron Todd Willingham, put to death by the state of Texas in 2004
for murdering his three young daughters by setting fire to his own
house, was the subject of a truly gut-churning piece by David Grann
in the New Yorker (the full story is 17 pages long; if you don't have
that kind of time, listen to the NPR version here).

It turns out that Willingham was almost undoubtedly innocent.

The Innocence Project, our own Chicago Tribune and Texas's Forensic
Science Commission all conducted independent reviews of the evidence
and all three found that the accusations of arson were completely
without scientific merit.

Craig Beyler, the arson expert commissioned by Texas, found that the
original investigator' s findings defied "rational reasoning" and had
a "characteristic of mystics or psychics." Beyler concluded that
Texas had put a "legally and factually innocent man" to death.

Why didn't Willingham appeal his conviction? He did. A number of
times. In every instance his pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears
right up until his last statement to the Associated Press.

So let's get this straight: In 1991 a father is unable to rescue his
three young girls from an accidental fire probably caused by faulty
wiring. He is then accused of murdering his own children. His
repeated proclamations of innocence are met mostly with people
calling him a baby-killer. Finally, in 2004 he's walked into a room,
strapped to a table and given a drug that blows up his heart.

That can actually happen in this country?

Furthermore, that can actually happen, and no one cares? It's seventh-
string news behind Obama's address to schoolchildren and who's going
to replace Paula Abdul on 'American Idol'?

In conjunction with Texas's discovery that its arson experts weren't
so expert, a two-year study by the National Academy of Sciences has
found that no forensic evidence except for DNA testing truly stands
up under scientific scrutiny.

That means everything from fingerprints to bite mark analysis is
basically without a firm scientific basis or national standard, yet
we convict people all the time based on types of evidence like this.

In the face of such overwhelming uncertainty about our justice
system, how can we justify the death penalty? Is one family's revenge
worth the innocent life of another just to keep a broken system of
executions in place?

http://www.chicagon ow.com/blogs/ off-the-markley/ 2009/09/the- death-
penalty-is-an- abomination- and-we-need- to-end-it. html