April 14, 2012

New analyses of capital punishment show gross injustice in its application and enormous costs in continuing to impose it. In Connecticut, a powerful, comprehensive study provided evidence that state death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime. Decades of research show that racial bias pervades death penalty cases. Minority defendants with white victims are much more likely to be sentenced to death than others; 35 percent of those executed nationally since 1976 were black, though blacks currently make up 12.6 percent of the population. The problem of inadequate counsel permeates the system, with many indigent defendants sentenced to death after major blunders by court-assigned lawyers. And a horrific number of innocent people have ended up on death row: 17 convicts with death sentences have been exonerated with DNA evidence since 1993, 123 with other evidence since 1973. Any careful evaluation leads to what the American Law Institute concluded after a review of decades of executions: the system cannot be fixed. It is practically impossible to rid the legal process of biases driven by race, class, and politics. Not to mention that it is immoral for a nation to kill its own people. Capital punishment, by overwhelming evidence, should be abolished throughout the United States.