The Trump administration’s unprecedented rush on its way out the door to execute prisoners illustrates a big part of what’s wrong with the death penalty. It is politicized, arbitrary and unjust.
Most people assume the death penalty is reserved for those whose guilt is beyond doubt. But time and again, we learn of people who never should have been sentenced to death because of extenuating circumstances or even because they had nothing to do with the underlying crime at all.
Trump and Attorney General William Barr have overseen eight executions since July, ending a federal 17-year hiatus. They have scheduled five more before Trump leaves the White House on Jan. 20, which will make 2020 the year with the most federal executions on record.
The political motivation behind this rush to kill is obvious. No one has been executed during a presidential transition for 100 years, but Trump and Barr want executions to take place before President-elect Joe Biden, who campaigned against the death penalty, takes office.
In 1989, Trump illustrated how the death penalty gets politicized when he called for resuming the New York death penalty in ads in four New York newspapers while making it clear he was spurred to act by charges against five New York teens for a crime they later turned out not to have committed. Now, Trump is cynically pardoning allies who have been convicted of crimes or commuting their sentences even as he busily oversees executions for others. This is the kind of grandstanding political behavior that has tainted the death penalty all along.
It’s hard to argue that each of the inmates scheduled for execution is getting a careful last-minute review, as Derrick Jamison received in Ohio when he was 90 minutes away from execution before he was eventually exonerated. It’s also hard to argue that each of the people now on death row would have still received the death penalty had the case been tried by a different judge, a different jury or a prosecutor in a different jurisdiction. Race, geography, the quality of defense lawyers and physical and mental health help decide who is sentenced to death. Since 1986, the majority of state-level executions has come from only 2% of U.S. counties. Executions should not be based on a system that is so arbitrary.
Yes, the crimes are unspeakable for which people have been put on death row – including the cases in which the Trump administration has executed or plans to execute inmates. But so were the crimes for which people were sentenced and later exonerated. After years of promises and attempted reforms, we should admit to ourselves we are unable to devise a system of capital punishment that executes only the guilty. Any safeguards we put in place are too likely to crumble when anger and passion over a heinous crime cloud our collective judgment. False confessions, mistaken eyewitnesses, witness perjury, withheld evidence, bogus “expert” testimony and simple coincidences also lead to mistaken verdicts.
When a careful re-examination of a case, or new evidence such as DNA testing, shows an innocent person is on death row, apologists for capital punishment are likely to say: “See, the system works.” That is absolute rubbish. Are we to expect that star-studded teams of volunteer defense lawyers or new evidentiary breakthroughs will come along in the nick of time to rescue every wrongfully convicted person?
Since 1973, 172 wrongfully convicted death row prisoners have been exonerated, including 21 in Illinois, which has abolished the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. That is a horrifying number. People sentenced to the alternative – life in prison – can be freed if they turn out to be innocent. But executions are final.
The states have been moving away from the death penalty. It is not legal in 22 states, and there is a governor’s moratorium in three others. No solid evidence has proved the death penalty deters crime. Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court should ban it on the federal level as well.
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