Possible Error Killing Someone Innocent Death Penalty
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the Death Penalty U.S. Supreme Court Upcoming Executions Reports AboutAbout DPIC DPIC Newsletter Staff & Board of Directors Support this Work Connect with DPIC Press Donate Enter your keywords View the results at Google, or enable JavaScript to view them here. Fact Sheet Upcoming Executions Execution Database State-by-State Innocence and the Death death penalty mistakes statistics Penalty: The Increasing Danger of Executing the Innocent by Richard C. Dieter, Esq. Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center July 1997 Table of Contents: Executive Summary Introduction Part I: The Danger of Mistaken Executions Part II: The Cases of Innocence A. Acquittals/Charges Dropped B. Reversals With the Probability of Innocence C. Released from Death Row, Probable Innocence Appendix: 48 Earlier Cases of Innocence References Joseph Burrows (IL), released 1994 photo by Loren Santow Perhaps the bleakest fact of all is that the death penalty is imposed not only in a freakish and discriminatory manner, but also in some cases upon defendants who are actually innocent. -Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., 19941 Executive Summary The danger that innocent people will be executed because of errors in the criminal justice system is getting worse. A total of 69 people have been released from death row since 1973 after evidence of their innocence emerged. Twenty-one condemn
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
Wrongful Execution Statistics
same period of time, over 982 people have been executed. Thus, for every eight
Irrevocable Mistakes Death Penalty Pro
people executed, we have found one person on death row who never should have been convicted. These statistics represent an intolerable risk other than murder, what crime has been removed from the death penalty choice? of executing 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 http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/node/523 two thirds of 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 http://deathpenaltycurriculum.org/student/c/about/arguments/argument3a.htm system of appeals had rejected his 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
revealed that they were sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. That’s more than one innocent person exonerated for every ten who have been executed.1 Wrongful convictions rob innocent people of decades of their lives, waste tax dollars, and retraumatize the victim’s family, while the people responsible remain unaccountable. Despite the best intentions of law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges and jurors, innocent people have been convicted and sentenced to death. The margin for error with the death penalty is too great. — Ray Samuels, former Police Chief of Newark, California What We've Learned in the DNA Era Hundreds of DNA exonerations reveal that murder cases are often riddled with problems: mistaken eyewitnesses, bad lawyers, shoddy forensics, unreliable jailhouse snitches, coerced confessions, and more. DNA cannot solve these problems – it can only tell us how bad they are. DNA evidence exists in just 5-10% of criminal cases – far fewer than one would think from TV crime shows.2 Some forensic evidence used in cases is now known to be based on junk science. The FBI announced that experts exaggerated the value of hair analysis in hundreds of cases, 32 of which resulted in a death sentence. Defendants in 9 of those cases have been executed. Finger print, bite mark, ballistics, and fire pattern analyses have also come under scrutiny.3 In cases where DNA evidence is available, courts can block access to testing, even when it could exonerate someone. Furthermore, scientific evidence is only as good as the people testing it. Crime labs from Baltimore to Oklahoma City have come under fire for errors and even fraud in their forensics. Case in point: Ray Krone was sentenced to death in Arizona for rape and murder, even though DNA found on the victim wasn’t his. The state argued against having the DNA submitted to the database since the jury convicted him even without physical evidence. A decade later, a crime lab worker ran the DNA through the database on his own, without a court order, and found the person who actually committed the crime. Despite the best intentions, we can’t be right 100% of the time The risk of executing an innocent person is not limited to those cases where lawyers sleep through trials. Despite the best efforts of police, prosecutors, judges, juries, witnesses, and defens