death penalty sources

["Bruce and Jean Livingston" <jeanlivingston@turbonet.com>]

I hope that this will allow many of you to browse on a variety of death
penalty issues, including race and innocence, that may interest you.  I am
attempting to let you go to the following link to the Death Penalty
Information Center:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/topics.html

I have contemplated entering into this discussion, but it is complicated,
time consuming, and subject to many emotional responses.  That being said, I
will venture into the area, as I suspect that I am a great deal more
familiar with it than most of you.  Forgive me if I do not answer all of
your inevitable, follow-up comments and questions on a timely basis.

While reform of the system is a desirable thing to insure evenhanded
application of the death penalty, I have reached the conclusion that such
reform is unattainable: reform is not possible that eliminates the risk of
convicting innocents.  While I agree that locking people up forever when
they are wrongfully convicted is a horrible alternative, it is less horrible
than eliminating them in our name.  Preserving life allows for the
possibility of rectifying the mistake.  Execution is irrevocable.  We cannot
have a death penalty unless we accept that executing the innocent is an
acceptable cost of doing business.

Browse, explore, find other sites that offer contrary views, and debate
freely.  But in the interests of keeping to the purpose of this listserve,
perhaps the debate should be put into the context of Idaho, Latah County and
whether we can afford the death penalty.

With that in mind, below my sign-off I will attach conservative columnist
George Will's 4/6/00 column.  I would just note that since publication of
Will's column two years ago, the number of innocent people released from
death row has grown from 87 to over 100.

Bruce Livingston

4/6/00

George Will

Time to rethink death penalty
WASHINGTON - ``Don't you worry about it,'' said the Oklahoma prosecutor to
the defense attorney. ``We're gonna needle your client. You know, lethal
injection, the needle. We're going to needle Robert.''
Oklahoma almost did. Robert Miller spent nine years on death row, during six
of which the state had DNA test results proving his sperm was not that of
the man who raped and killed the 92-year-old woman. The prosecutor said the
tests only proved that another man had been with Miller during the crime.
Finally, the weight of scientific evidence, wielded by an implacable defense
attorney, got Miller released and another man indicted.

You could fill a book with such hair-curling true stories of blighted lives
and justice traduced. Three authors have filled one. It should change the
argument about capital punishment and other aspects of the criminal justice
system. Conservatives, especially, should draw this lesson from the book:
Capital punishment, like the rest of the criminal justice system, is a
government program, so skepticism is in order.

Horror, too, is a reasonable response to what Barry Scheck, Peter Neufeld
and Jim Dwyer demonstrate in ``Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution and
Other Dispatches from the Wrongly Convicted.'' You will not soon read a more
frightening book. It is a catalog of appalling miscarriages of justice, some
of them nearly lethal. Their cumulative weight compels the conclusion that
many innocent people are in prison, and some innocent people have been
executed.

Scheck and Neufeld (both members of O.J. Simpson's ``dream team'' of defense
attorneys) founded the pro-bono Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo
School of Law in New York to aid persons who convincingly claim to have been
wrongly convicted. Dwyer, winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, is currently a
columnist for the New York Daily News. Their book is a heartbreaking and
infuriating compendium of stories of lives ruined by:

Forensic fraud, such as that by the medical examiner who, in one death
report, included the weight of the gallbladder and spleen of a man from whom
both organs had been surgically removed long ago.

Mistaken identifications by eyewitnesses or victims, which contributed to 84
percent of the convictions overturned by the Innocence Project's DNA
exonerations.

Criminal investigations, especially of the most heinous crimes, that become
``echo chambers'' in which, because of the normal human craving for
retribution, the perceptions of prosecutors and jurors are shaped by what
they want to be true. (The authors cite evidence that most juries will
convict even when admissions have been repudiated by the defendant and
contradicted by physical evidence.)

The sinister culture of jailhouse snitches, who earn reduced sentences by
fabricating ``admissions'' by fellow inmates to unsolved crimes.

Incompetent defense representation, such as that by the Kentucky attorney in
a capital case who gave his business address as Kelley's Keg tavern.

The list of ways the criminal justice system misfires could be extended, but
some numbers tell the most serious story: In the 24 years since the
resumption of executions under Supreme Court guidelines, about 620 have
occurred, but 87 condemned persons - one for every seven executed - had
their convictions vacated by exonerating evidence. In eight of these cases,
and in many more exonerations not involving death row inmates, the evidence
was from DNA.

One inescapable inference from these numbers is that some of the 620 persons
executed were innocent. Which is why, after the exoneration of 13 prisoners
on Illinois' death row since 1987, for reasons including exculpatory DNA
evidence, Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, has imposed a moratorium on
executions.

Scheck, Neufeld and Dwyer note that when a plane crashes there is an
intensive investigation to locate the cause and prevent recurrences. Why is
there no comparable urgency about demonstrable, multiplying failures in the
criminal justice system?

They recommend many reforms, especially pertaining to the use of DNA and the
prevention of forensic incompetence and fraud. Sen. Patrick Leahy's
Innocence Protection Act would enable inmates to get DNA testing pertinent
to a conviction or death sentence, and ensure that courts will hear
resulting evidence.

The good news is that science can increasingly serve the defense of
innocence. But there is other news.

Two powerful arguments for capital punishment are that it saves lives, if
its deterrence effect is not vitiated by sporadic implementation, and it
enhances society's valuation of life by expressing proportionate anger at
the taking of life. But that valuation is lowered by careless or corrupt
administration of capital punishment, which ``Actual Innocence'' powerfully
suggests is intolerably common.

George F. Will is a Washington columnist and television commentator.

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