A tip o' the hat to Radney Balko for highlighting the work of the National Registry of Exonerations, which seeks to track cases where persons found guilty of crimes were later shown to have been wrongfully convicted, and exonerated.
The database compiled and analyzed by the researchers contains information on 873 exonerations for which they have the most detailed evidence. The researchers are aware of nearly 1,200 other exonerations, for which they have less data.
They found that those 873 exonerated defendants spent a combined total of more than 10,000 years in prison, an average of more than 11 years each.
There's more at the link.
Some of the exonerations recorded by the database are horrifying to read. Here are a couple of examples taken from a lengthy report by the Registry (link is to an Adobe Acrobat document in .PDF format).
Edward Carter, a 19-year-old African American man, was convicted of the rape of a pregnant woman in Detroit in 1974 and sentenced to life in prison. Carter’s conviction rested entirely on the cross-racial identification by the white victim. Approximately 30 years later, he sought DNA testing through a Michigan innocence project. A search revealed that the biological evidence that was collected at the time of the crime had been destroyed, but a police officer who was involved in the search became curious. He found fingerprints that had been lifted from the crime scene and on his own sent them to the FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System. The prints were matched to a convicted sex offender who was in prison for similar rapes committed at about that time in the same area. Based on this new evidence, Carter was released in 2010, after more than 35 years in prison.
# # #
In 1985 a white student was abducted and raped by an African American man at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. Two weeks later the victim was shown six photographs of young African American men. Five were black and white side views; one was a color frontal shot of Timothy Cole, a 26 year old veteran who was studying at Texas Tech and who became a suspect because he talked to a detective near the scene of the abduction. The victim picked Cole’s picture, identified him at a live lineup the next day, and testified against him at trial. Cole’s brother and several friends also testified and swore that Cole was studying at home at the time of the crime. Cole was convicted in 1986 and sentenced to 25 years in prison. His appeal was denied.
In 1995, Jerry Wayne Johnson, a Texas prisoner serving a 99-year sentence for two rapes, wrote to Lubbock County police and prosecutors that he had committed the rape for which Cole had been convicted. His letters were ignored. In 1999 Cole, who was severely asthmatic, died in prison. In 2000 Johnson wrote another letter confessing to Cole’s crime to a supervising judge. It was summarily rejected. Eight years later, DNA tests obtained by the Innocence Project of Texas proved that Johnson was guilty of the rape and that Cole had been innocent. Cole was exonerated in an extraordinary posthumous court hearing in 2009, and pardoned by the governor of Texas in 2010.
This is precisely why I'm opposed to the death penalty. If it could be administered without any possibility of error, and therefore posed no risk to a potentially wrongfully convicted person, I'd not be so concerned; but there have been far too many cases where an inmate on death row has later been exonerated. If they were still alive, they could at least be released, and compensated to some extent for their ordeal. However, if someone's been wrongly executed (and this has happened more than once), there's no possibility of correcting the original judicial error.
Kudos to the National Registry of Exonerations for their work. I hope it inspires lawyers and other interested parties to take up more cases like those they record.
Peter
16 comments:
I oppose the *government* executing someone.
It's one thing if someone breaks into your home at 3 AM and *you* shoot him.
It's something entirely different when a person has been disarmed, cuffed, imprisoned, and is no longer a threat to society--and then the government comes along and kills them.
To second Aaron's comment above, I am completely in support of the intended crime victim imposing the death penalty at the time of the crime.
Government - any government, in any form, at any level, is neither intelligent enough, nor competent enough nor sufficiently trustworthy, to be entrusted with that kind of responsibility.
Bob: A panicked citizen killing someone in the night (or maybe a mob of citizens tracking 'the criminal' down the next day and lynching him) is preferable to law? How far we have come.
With the advances in DNA, I believe it is possible to KNOW who is guilty. For the very reasons given, I am in favor of the penalty. If anything, we should be faster at putting them to death, not slower. If DNA ties the perp to the crime, hang him tomorrow. Or as in the case of the 2 guys that raped the women of that family then burned them with the house in CT, they should NOT be breathing today.
Remember reading this??
Ecclesiastes 8:11 NKJV
Because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.
God's Word says it will deter others if the criminals are punished quickly.
News article about the murderers:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40071693/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/t/killer-mom-daughters-gets-death-sentence/#.T7zUQ8XpWD8
Romans 13 says the government is there at God's command to punish the evil doer. "Bearing the sword" for a reason. Genesis 9:6 "if man sheds blood, by man his blood will be shed". That is God's pronouncement for capital punishment. No where in scripture is that ever rescinded.
I see no civilizing value in warehousing murderers for their lives. When you do that, in my opinion, you are saying their lives have more value than the victims they killed.
I'm perfectly fine with the death penalty in itself, but the burden of proof must be higher. IE: caught redhanded, or reams of physical evidence all pointing the same way. (He left his semen on the victim, his skin and blood under her fingernails, his fingerprints on the murder weapon, we're absolutely sure it's him).
I also think it should apply to child rapists(pedophiles).
PS: When there is no doubt, and the guilt can be proven as fact, then there is no reason for a lengthy death row either, go right ahead and execute within a week of conviction.
Mikael, right on. I was going to add that as well. I could easily go along with capital punishment for violent or serial rapists and child molesters. I have seen first hand what molestation / child rape causes their victims. It affects the victim until for their entire life.
Mikael, right on. I was going to add that as well. I could easily go along with capital punishment for violent or serial rapists and child molesters. I have seen first hand what molestation / child rape causes their victims. It affects the victim until for their entire life.
Peter, John Lott has an article clarifying these statistics which you may find interesting. It is here: http://johnrlott.blogspot.com/2012/05/2000-convicted-criminals-have-been.html
-Popgun
A panicked citizen killing someone in the night (or maybe a mob of citizens tracking 'the criminal' down the next day and lynching him) is preferable to law? How far we have come.
Anonymous @7:04, you're a moron. (We're all shocked.)
The point Bob was making is that when the criminal is in your house, there is no possibility that you have the wrong guy.
No one here endorses after-the-fact mob justice, which is, in fact, precisely the point we're trying to make about the death penalty by the way.
Anon@0704, the difference between the victim and the government is the difference between self-defense and retribution. Most of us absolutely would not support shooting the home invader if he is compliant and poses no threat; if we shoot, it's not to punish him for breaking in, but rather to defend ourselves from the threat.
See, for example, the case of Jerome Ersland, of Oklahoma City. His initial shots were righteous: he was defending himself from thugs. When he stepped over the body to get another gun and shot him again, he crossed the line from defense to murder because the little dirtbag was not an active threat at the time. I'm okay with the outcome of the trial (Ersland was found guilty of murder 1).
Equating an armed citizen acting in defense of home and family with a lynch mob is disingenuous, to say the least.
Peter, you are living in la la land if you want to wait for anything humans do to "...be administered without any possibility of error." Human affairs don't work that way.
Be pleased that technology has improved to the point where we can can be more sure than ever that the one sentenced to do the time is the one who did the crime, and that we can in many cases take another and deeper look at evidence and right the cases we got wrong before this technology was available.
In cases like Timothy Cole's, bear in mind that the man who did them confessed and was ignored. That said, when we find that our system made such an error and we cannot offer redress to the victim of the error, we can but apologize to his memory and resolve in his name and memory to do better in future. Dressing ourselves in sackcloth and ashes and beratinging ourselves in perpetuity over mistakes - and that's what they are, writ large or small - serves no purpose.
Mistakes must be learned from and moved on from, not set on the mantel to serve as a constant reminder that we're not perfect. If you're an adult worthy of the name you know that without being browbeaten by yourself or anyone else about it.
I think some of you misunderstand me. I'm not against the death penalty itself - I'm against its being used so long as there's a possibility that a wrongly convicted person may be executed. Since I know of no way to ensure that will never happen, I believe that the death penalty should not be used.
Life imprisonment is anything but pleasant (I've worked with many inmates subject to such sentences, and many of them commented that it would be easier to be dead - in fact, many attempt or succeed in committing suicide). It's no sinecure to sentence someone to life behind concrete walls and iron bars. However, it does allow us to rectify a wrongful conviction and make what amends we can. After execution, that's no longer possible.
As for the death penalty being administered without any possibility of error, this can be done in some cases. If eyewitness testimony and forensic investigations and DNA evidence all coincide, there's not much doubt about guilt or innocence, is there? Under such circumstances, it's unlikely in the extreme that the death penalty will be wrongly imposed. However, in many cases DNA evidence is not available, and/or some evidence may be more or less trustworthy. That being the case, given that absolute certainty is so often impossible, I'd rather have no-one executed at all.
It's fundamentally a moral issue for me. I don't believe it's either excusable or forgivable to murder an innocent person, whether judicially or otherwise. Since we can't guarantee that won't happen under our present system, it follows that the system must be changed until that guarantee can be given with certainty. Others, who don't hold innocent life in the same regard, may differ.
"beratinging". Gad. I thought I'd done a better job of proofreading.
State executions are not retribution. They are punishment for a crime and moreover reassurance to the rest of the citizenry. We as a society agree on a set of rules to live by. Some of those we codify as law and set a penalty for not obeying them. If we do not administer the prescribed punishment or some form of it, the rest of us who obey the laws feel we are being played for chumps. Some of us live within the laws because it's the right thing to do, not because we're afraid of being punished for breaking them, and understand that is the price for reaping the benefits of living in a society. Some of us, though, have to be forcibly reminded of that price and why it's paid, and of the higher price to be paid for not living within the law.
Like you, I have no problem with the concept of capital punishment in itself - because some people deserve it. The problem, as you've identified, lies within the fact that the government is at best merely incompetent, and at worst, outright evil.
Looking at the examples posted, I don't see a problem or indictment of the death penalty. I see a lot of other problems that need to be fixed from police practices, prosecutor practices, and stupid juries. I can't imagine why a victim would testify that a man did the rape when they don't know unless they have police and prosecutors behind them swearing they got the guy.
It doesn't matter if you get rid of the death penalty if you don't fix the problems in our criminal justice system that allow these false convictions. Abolishing the death penalty fixes nothing.
Also, I fail to see the real difference between robbing someone of his life versus robbing someone of years of his life by throwing them in prison. Part of their life or their entire life, it is still a tragedy. Getting rid of the death penalty stops nothing, it just makes you feel less guilty.
Finally, If some of these groups would sponsor useful legislation to fix these problems, I think they would find much less resistance than they would for getting rid of the death penalty.
MechAg94
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