Capital Punishment Chance Of Error
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2014 5:34 PM Big Data Study: 1 in 25 Given Death Penalty Sentence Are Likely Innocent By Elliot Hannon A
Death Penalty Mistakes Cases
view of the death chamber from the witness room at the Southern death penalty mistakes statistics Ohio Correctional Facility. Photo by Mike Simons/Getty Images A new study published online this week by the National
Death Penalty Innocent Killed Statistics
Academy of Sciences takes a shot at determining the rate at which the U.S. mistakenly sentences innocent prisoners to death. The findings are unsettling. The study’s authors conclude that based wrongful death penalty executions on the statistical data, it can safely be estimated that 4.1 percent, or one-in-25 criminal defendants, sentenced to death in the U.S. are innocent. In fact, that’s probably low-balling the actual number of erroneous death penalty sentences. “We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States,” the study’s abstract death penalty puts innocent lives at risk reads. Here’s the problem the study aims to address: The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to death. This makes it possible to use data on death row exonerations to estimate the overall rate of false conviction among death sentences. Advertisement “From 1973 to 2004, 1.6 percent of those sentenced to death in the U.S. — 138 prisoners — were exonerated and released because of innocence,” the Associated Press reports. That number, however, according to the study, likely short changes the actual number of wrongly handed down death
considerable evidence that many mistakes have been made in sentencing people to death. Since 1973, at least 121 people have been released from death row after evidence of their innocence emerged. During the
Irrevocable Mistakes Death Penalty Pro
same period of time, over 982 people have been executed. Thus, for every eight people lethal injection mistakes executed, we have found one person on death row who never should have been convicted. These statistics represent an intolerable risk of executing
Statistics Of Innocent People Killed By Death Penalty
the innocent. If an automobile manufacturer operated with similar failure rates, it would be run out of business. Our capital punishment system is unreliable. A recent study by Columbia University Law School found that two thirds of http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/04/28/a_new_study_estimates_error_rate_of_death_penalty_sentences_in_u_s.html all capital trials contained serious errors. When the cases were retried, over 80% of the defendants were not sentenced to death and 7% were completely acquitted. Many of the releases of innocent defendants from death row came about as a result of factors outside of the justice system. Recently, journalism students in Illinois were assigned to investigate the case of a man who was scheduled to be executed, after the system of appeals had rejected his http://deathpenaltycurriculum.org/student/c/about/arguments/argument3a.htm legal claims. The students discovered that one witness had lied at the original trial, and they were able to find the true killer, who confessed to the crime on videotape. The innocent man who was released was very fortunate, but he was spared because of the informal efforts of concerned citizens, not because of the justice system. In other cases, DNA testing has exonerated death row inmates. Here, too, the justice system had concluded that these defendants were guilty and deserving of the death penalty. DNA testing became available only in the early 1990s, due to advancements in science. If this testing had not been discovered until ten years later, many of these inmates would have been executed. And if DNA testing had been applied to earlier cases where inmates were executed in the 1970s and 80s, the odds are high that it would have proven that some of them were innocent as well. Society takes many risks in which innocent lives can be lost. We build bridges, knowing that statistically some workers will be killed during construction; we take great precautions to reduce the number of unintended fatalities. But wrongful executions are a preventable risk. By substituting a sentence of life without parole, we meet society's needs of punishment and protection without running the risk of an erroneous and irrevocable punishment.
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