Wrongly sentenced to die

From Brian W. Stull, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union's Durham, N.C.-based Capital Punishment Project:

Arguing against a proposal for a moratorium on executions in North Carolina, John Lane claims in a March 4 column that being "tough on crime" and "executing murderers will save innocent lives."

Lane builds his primary argument on a faulty premise: states must execute dangerous killers, or their killings will continue. Not so. Locking up dangerous criminals for life, with no chance of parole, will ensure safety in our communities.

Lane looks for support from isolated studies showing that the death penalty deters murders. But those studies have been repeatedly debunked by respected statisticians, including recent work from Yale, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Statisticians find no evidence that capital punishment deters murders. That is not surprising. It is nonsensical to imagine that a would-be murderer pauses to contemplate the availability of the death penalty in the moments before deciding whether to kill.

It's election season, so Lane also raises the specter of Willie Horton, a tactic used 20 years ago, to scare the public and legislators into ignoring the myriad of problems with the death penalty. We shouldn't be scared into being "tough on crime." Instead, we need to be smart on crime.

The first step is recognizing that too many innocent people have been sentenced to death to avoid pausing to examine where things have gone wrong. Three death-row inmates have recently been exonerated, including Jonathan Gregory Hoffman, sentenced to death by a Union County jury in 1996 for a crime he did not commit. This wrongful conviction occurred because prosecutors suppressed evidence that its key witness received a deal for his testimony. The other two wrongful convictions -- including one in neighboring Tennessee -- occurred because of a false confession, inadequate state-appointed legal representation, and prosecutors' use of junk forensic science. This brings the number of exonerated death-row inmates to 127 -- including six from North Carolina -- since 1973.

As these cases demonstrate, being "tough on crime" too often means convicting the wrong person. It too often means stubborn adherence to unreliable police tactics and junk forensic science. According to the Innocence Project, an amazing 75 percent of wrongful convictions involve misidentification, yet all but three states continue to use the same unreliable identification procedures that led to these grave mistakes. Twenty-five percent of wrongful convictions result from false confessions. A "tough on crime" environment puts pressure on police that leads them to rely on snitches who testify for favors.

This "tough on crime" policy also means inadequate funding for indigent defense. At trial, impoverished innocent defendants face the lottery of assigned counsel and public defender systems. Some are good and dedicated, but many are overwhelmed by a combination of impossibly high caseloads and unconscionably low resources. They also may face overzealous prosecutors motivated to win convictions, not serve justice. This may lead to a willingness to cheat and hide exculpatory evidence. When the judicial system fails, governors have the power to grant clemency but, too often, they remain petrified with political fear of another Willie Horton.

We have the knowledge, technology and resources to take a different course, to make our criminal justice system more reliable by fixing its problems. For killers, the choice is not limited to death or freedom. Being smart on crime means appropriate punishments for the guilty and reasonable safeguards to protect the innocent. A moratorium would be an important first step.

http://www.charlotte.com/409/story/532699.html