Capital Justice System in U.S. Irretrievably Broken
In his column today Adam Liptak looks at the American Law Institute, which created the intellectual framework for the modern capital justice system almost 50 years ago. And then pronounced its project a failure and walked away from it:
A study commissioned by the institute said that decades of experience have proved that the system cannot reconcile the twin goals of individualized decisions about who should be executed and systemic fairness. It added that capital punishment is plagued by racial disparities; is enormously expensive even as many defense lawyers are underpaid and some are incompetent; risks executing innocent people; and is undermined by the politics that come with judicial elections.
Roger S. Clark, who teaches at Rutgers School of Law in Camden, N.J., and was one of the leaders of the movement to have the institute condemn the death penalty outright, said he was satisfied with the compromise. “Capital punishment is going to be around for a while,” Professor Clark said. “What this does is pull the plug on the whole intellectual underpinnings for it.”
Liptak quotes University of California, Berkeley, Franklin E. Zimring that “It’s very bad news for the continued legitimacy of the death penalty… But it’s the kind of bad news that has many more implications for the long term than for next week or the next term of the Supreme Court.”
And what do you think?
7 Responses to “Capital Justice System in U.S. Irretrievably Broken”
Joe,
Thank you for bringing this to light. I'd love to say “I told you so” to all the commenters who have argued with me over this issue in the past, but that would be impolite [he said with a self-satisfied smirk].
Since the Supremes are unlikely to address it, let's send a copy to every state legislator and hope a few states will see the light and abolish this abomination.
The state legislators should be embarrassed when someone on death row is FINALLY set free when DNA evidence pronounces the entire system a sham, but they aren't. They just say, “See? The system works.”
We have many cases in my area where “wonder dogs” could track over hill and dale and lead deputies right to the culprit YEARS after the crime occurred — or so the dog handler said in court. FINALLY, after 20 years of this nonsense, a judge asked for a demonstration and the prize dog couldn't find his own ass.
So one would think that all the cases this bozo testified in would be reviewed, right? Wrong. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the truth is finally coming out, but it is a slow slog.
Yes, vey9. All excellent points. But it is far worse.
Even when the authorities get the right person, the percentage of African American defendants who receive the death penalty is 16 times that of whites committing sililar crimes. Highest percentage: a black who kills a white. Lowest percentage: a white who kills a black (gender adjusted as white women almost never get sentenced to death).
The statistics are very similar based on wealth differentiation, with the poor having a far greater chance, on a percentage basis, of recieving the death penalty than the affluent committing a similar crime.
There are also dramatic differences state to state in the training and funding of capital defense lawyers and the money available for defense experts like investigators, forensics experts, mitigation specialists, and others. Some states restrict attorney fees to less than $10,000 and other expenses to $5000. This in a genre where adequate defense costs run well in excess of $150,000. At least one state, Alabama (while it provides an attorney at trial) denies appointed counsel on appeal for the poor who have been sentenced to death . Death penalty verdicts have been affirmed, and people executed, in cases where attorneys have appeared in court drunk, fallen asleep in court during trial, have been disbarred, and have made public statements that their clients should be executed.
People reflexively want to kill those who have killed. They just don't want to pay the taxpayer cost to do it properly…and, even if they did, it would not overcome the inherent prejudice in the application of the death penalty.
And, none of this even begins to address the moral issue of state sponsored execution.
My biggest problem with the system is the simplest: when you're wrong, how do you free the victim?
Or, you can look at the lighter side of bias and miscarriage of justice:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/dna_evide…
We need a far more stricter system. We need to use the technology we have in determining guilt or innocence, such as DNA testing, much more often. We also need to re-institute corporal punishment in the form of caning. We need to relax 4th amendment rules for search and seizer until crime is at much lower levels. We need to use the national guard to clean out gang ridden areas like east and central LA to make them safe for the people living there. As well, we need to shoot terrorists and foreign gang members as terrorists. Finally, we need to pay our law enforcement much more and require better educated candidates for this vital service.
Here's one intellectual underpinning which remains intact: Persons receiving capital punishment have a recidivism rate = 0%.
This is not theoretical.
Good point. And if we just preemptively killed everyone we could wipe out crime completely! That one can't be argued either.