Photo courtesy of Newtown graffiti
Anti-Death Penalty Column by Meera Butalia
I am African-American, presently incarcerated on Alabama death row, since July 5, 1979. At the present time, my future is looking pretty bleak, but I am still very much hopeful that things will change and my life won’t end here by my being put to death. I am now down to my last two rounds of appeals. I hope my present situation won’t keep any one from writing. I really need someone I can relate to doing whatever time I have left. I am 47 years old, born April 29, 1951, dark brown complexion, weight 229. Hometown Mobile, Alabama. I am open-minded, with a good sense of humor, I am also sincere. My life may be ending but I still have a lot to offer through friendship in the way of touching others heart and minds, to enlighten them about myself and my many walks in life. I am interested in hearing from any one who is sincere, open-minded and down to earth. Age, sex, race or religion doesn’t matter.
These are the words of inmate #Z-389, Freddie Lee Wright, executed on March 3, 2000, for a crime he did not commit. His first trial had a racially-mixed jury that voted 11-1 for acquittal, but in the second trial, prosecutors used almost all of their discretionary strikes to remove potential black jurors from the pool, and an all-white jury convicted and sentenced Wright to death. Since his first two trials and execution, the witness who implicated him has redacted his statements, and it has been discovered that someone else was originally indicted for the crime. The other suspect had bullets that matched the crime weapon and had an incriminating statement from his girlfriend.
In reference to the case, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackburn wrote, “Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.”
If even one innocent person has died at the hands of a system that society trusts with the choice of life and death, that system is fundamentally flawed.
Each factor that contributed to the state murder of Freddie Lee Wright characterizes the mistakes and disparities that often marr the justice of the death penalty process. One in 25 people who are sentenced to the death penalty are wrongly convicted, according to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This problem starts at the very beginning, when prosecutors are selecting jurors to serve on capital trials. Some district attorney offices purposely train prosecutors to exclude black citizens from jury service, and teach them methods for masking racial bias to avoid racial discrimination lawsuits. Prosecutors are aware of the unconscious racial bias that motivates jury decisions, like the fact that of the 313 people executed between 1977 and 1995, 36 have been convicted of killing a black person while 249 had allegedly killed a white person. Of the 178 white defendants executed, only three were convicted of killing a person of color. Though 49 percent of all homicide victims are white, 77 percent of death penalty cases since 1976 have involved a white victim. This disparity exemplifies the racial bias that often permeates capital cases, and is so prevalent that it cannot be ignored.
Though prosecutors recognize the unconscious bias that motivates these outcomes, the juries themselves are often unaware of the implicit bias that results in the wrongful conviction of black suspects, which makes this discrimination even harder to address. Antonin Scalia himself, a conservative Supreme Court Justice who was a staunch advocate for the death penalty, wrote in an opinion offered in a case about jury bias that “unconscious operation of irrational sympathies and antipathies, including racial, upon jury decision and (hence) prosecutorial decisions is real… and ineradicable.” Scalia recognized that racial bias will always operate within the jury system, and there is no way to completely eradicate it.
When Peg Dorer, the director of the North Carolina Conference of District Attorneys, was asked about programs to address racial bias in jury selection, she responded, “Okay, so if all prosecutors in North Carolina are intentionally racially biased, what are we supposed to do with that? How do you undo that?… I don’t know how you teach non-bias.”
There’s no denying that there’s bias within the system. We found our confidence in the death penalty upon the notion that it is a just process, and give the state the right to take lives because we believe that the lives of the correctly-accused will be taken. But they aren’t always, and just as Scalia and Dorer said, there’s no way to truly eradicate the bias that leads to wrongful executions. We can’t continue to make the irrevocable decision to take a life, when we are unconfident in the system that selects the life that will be taken.
Pro-Death Penalty Column by Harper Johnson
The argument for capital punishment is not very complicated. I believe that capital punishment is moral and should be upheld because there are people on Earth who deserve to die, and furthermore should not be kept alive in prison. While I realize that death is a harsh punishment, there is no shortage of humans who have forfeited their right to life.
On March 22, 1978, Jeffrey Rignall was abducted by John Wayne Gacy. He was then drugged, raped and tortured before waking up in Lincoln Park the next day. While Rignall escaped, others were not so lucky. Gacy was charged and convicted on 33 counts of murder. He tortured, raped, and killed his victims, and then buried them in the crawl space of his house. On May 10, 1994, Gacy was executed.
It is because of people like John Wayne Gacy that I believe that the death penalty should stay. I do not think it is unreasonable to say that Gacy is a terrible human being and deserves death. Many people argue that capital punishment should be prohibited, citing three main reasons: capital punishment is extremely expensive, capital punishment introduces the possibility of executing an innocent person, and killing any offender is immoral.
Firstly, capital punishment is, without a doubt, a very costly system. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, “cases without the death penalty cost $740,000, while cases where the death penalty is sought cost $1.26 million.” While for some this means that we should abolish such a costly system, I think that we should make changes to make it more cost-efficient. The cost of the death penalty comes from the seemingly never-ending appeals process to which criminals are entitled. In my opinion, it would not be hard to expedite this process by eliminating the claims to appeals that are clearly frivolous or unreasonable.
This brings me to my second point. Obviously, there is always some risk that innocent people will be convicted in a court of law. It is also clear that the consequence– death– is much more severe than life in prison. To me, this means that the death penalty should not be used extremely frequently, and should only be used in cases where there is indisputable evidence such as DNA or video documentation. However, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, 144 people have been exonerated from death row since 1973. This is 1.6 percent of all death row inmates since 1973. These 144 were not executed, and thus faced the same reality of any inmate who was wrongfully imprisoned for a long period of time. Additionally, thanks to modern developments such as DNA testing and an abundance of cameras, the chances that someone is wrongfully convicted is extremely rare in the twenty-first century. In fact, in the list of exonerated death row inmates, the most recent conviction was in 2000, 18 years ago.
To address the last point, the killing of a violent murderer and rapist is not murder. The idea that capital punishment is hypocritical and that no one is allowed to take another life is completely unsupported. It should be very easy to understand that some people have forfeited their right to live by committing heinous acts.
In summary, capital punishment is a flawed system. It is expensive, and in extremely rare cases, innocent people could be executed. However, I believe that these flaws are all flaws of the death penalty system, not of capital punishment itself. These flaws can be solved without throwing the concept of capital punishment away. I believe that the death penalty can be a reasonable punishment, and that there are some people that do not deserve to be fed, supported, or allowed to walk the earth.