How to never execute an innocent person
Posted by Thomas Nephew on January 19th, 2003
[Here is something I wrote in May, 2001 and posted to an interesting service called "Abuzz," a discussion forum site hosted by the New York Times. A discussion and some additional links to other sites ensued. Here is a link to the article and discussion (registration required); here is the item itself. I've made a couple of edits for clarity.]
I submit that the only way to be absolutely sure of never executing an innocent person is to never execute anyone. I think this is a compelling (even the most compelling) argument for abolishing the death penalty.
To try to focus whatever discussion happens here, I would like to offer some definitions and comments:
–”Innocent” means truly innocent, not merely what a jury declares. I have great respect for the jury system, but it can not be infallible.
–Absolutely sure means just that. DNA testing illustrates the problem: death sentences are being overturned because new techniques disprove or strongly counter jury findings. Other technologies will come along that will give us additional power to judge guilt or innocence. I submit that each such new technology will reveal a nonzero percentage of death row inmates to be innocent.
–I concede that many death row inmates are in fact guilty. I concede moreover that if my own family or friends were their victims, I would be sorely tempted to wish for these criminals’ deaths. I would have to force myself to remember that any death penalty system will be fallible and will therefore execute some innocent people.
–I consider other arguments against the death penalty to have some merit, but to be less compelling than this one. For instance, racial or other demographic disparities in death sentences are troubling, but are not in and of themselves evidence of injustice: the disparities *may* reflect [real differences in] serious criminality, which will have causes that should be addressed. At any rate, I argue that this is a separate issue, to be taken up in other discussions.
–I concede that some cases will be so “obvious” as to not be possible to overturn with any new evidence: e.g., multiple eyewitnesses and/or uncontroverted video recordings demonstrate a person’s guilt. Despite the examples, I do not concede that it is possible to systematically define these cases clearly in advance; eyewitnesses can be suborned or mistaken, videos can be misleading.
–Executing innocent people may not bother everyone if the proportion can be reduced to some low percentage. For such people, first imagine yourself as an (extremely unlucky) innocent person about to be executed; then state how low the percentage needs to be for the death penalty to be acceptable to you, and state how you would go about ascertaining that proportion.
–I don’t consider this argument to have some kind of pacifist corollary implying that governments should never engage in war. A nation may be faced with self-defense needs, defined narrowly or broadly, that require military action and the prospect of killing innocent civilians. I do not think this applies to criminals; an alternative of long or lifetime incarceration exists that has no corollary in wartime affairs.
Some counterarguments have put a price tag — or, rather, a “death tag”– on my continued conviction that the death penalty is wrong. By comparing county murder rates in states with and without the death penalty, one statistically sophisticated (although apparently unrefereed) study* estimates that about 18 lives were saved per execution in the 1990s (with a 95% confidence interval from 8 to 28 lives per execution). I hope I’ll have time to discuss this and other rational arguments about the death penalty in the next week or so.
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*“Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence from Post-moratorium Panel Data,” Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul H. Rubin, Joanna M. Shepherd, January 2002. (Acrobat file, 87kb). Numerous discussions with other experts in the field make it unlikely serious statistical or methodological errors happened, but the article is currently listed as “in submission” on Mr. Dezhbakhsh’s university web page.
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September 16th, 2008 at 9:47 am
[...] prepare to be deeply ashamed of this country on September 23. In the long run, there’s only one sure way to prevent executing innocent people — and that’s to abolish the death [...]