Arguments Against the Death Penalty

David R. Dow, a law professor who has himself defended numerous death penalty cases, provides an interesting perspective on the debate:

EARLIER this week, the Supreme Court decided, in a 5-to-3 opinion, that a Tennessee prison inmate named Paul G. House was entitled to prove he did not commit the crime for which he was sent to death row. On the same day, I received a letter from Centurion Ministries, which argued for more than a decade that a Virginia man named Roger K. Coleman had not committed the crime for which he was executed in 1992. The letter admitted that Centurion had been wrong.

These cases have something in common: they pivot on the question of innocence. For too many years now, though, death penalty opponents have seized on the nightmare of executing an innocent man as a tactic to erode support for capital punishment in America.

Dow's claim's this perpsective misses the larger issues:

Of the 50 or so death row inmates I have represented, I have serious doubts about the guilt of three or four — that is, 6 to 8 percent, about what scholars estimate to be the percentage of innocent people on death row.

In 98 percent of the cases, however, in 49 out of 50, there were appalling violations of legal principles: prosecutors struck jurors based on their race; the police hid or manufactured evidence; prosecutors reached secret deals with jailhouse snitches; lab analysts misrepresented forensic results. Most of the cases do not involve bogus claims of innocence, like the one that swirled for 15 years around Roger Coleman, but the government corruption that the federal courts overlook so that the states can go about their business of executing.

The House case will make it hard for abolitionists to shift their focus from the question of innocence, but that is what they ought to do. They ought to focus on the far more pervasive problem: that the machinery of death in America is lawless, and in carrying out death sentences, we violate our legal principles nearly all of the time.

I think Dow overstates his argument a bit; the occassional execution of an innocent person is indeed one negative of the death penalty.  But I share his perspective that this is not the only reason to oppose the death penalty, and the possibilty of wrongful executions is not by itself decisive.  After all, by that reasoning, we would never imprison anyone, since the criminal justice system makes mistakes in those cases too.

In my view the single biggest negative of the death penalty is that it distracts attention from other policy reforms that would have larger effects in reducing crime.   Drug legalization is the single most important example.

Comments

[Laurent GUERBY]

Problem is that you can free a wrongly imprisoned person but you cannot get them back from the graves so that weakens your comparison.

Otherwise I'm in full agreement about death penalty and drug legalization :).

[Lance Landall]

Hi there,
I just wondered whether you might be interested in my poem 'The Death Penalty'. My web address is www.poetrywithamission.co.nz
Regards,
Lance Landall

[Angel Alia]

I think that there should always be a chance for every person. Whether he/she committed crime, there is always that point when one realizes and seeks for the true meaning in his/her life. I am against this death penalty for it stops the chance for a person to start anew.