The Death Penalty

I grew up being pro-death penalty and can remember the use of the firing squad in Draper and the controversy it stirred up in 1996. I remember reading newspaper articles and wondering why it took them so long to execute this violent criminal who had been on Death Row for 8 years. The violence and disregard for human life and dignity with which the crimes those on Death Row have been found guilty of, in my mind, do deserve the death penalty. Rape, murder, torture, and child molestation are gross and sickening crimes which, if a person is proven guilty of, deserve more than life in prison. These are societal ills which I believe puts a person beyond the hope of rehabilitation and merits the death penalty. However, my position on the death penalty has changed in the past year in light of my more moderate political stance and my desire to learn about both sides of the political issues that seem so divisive in our country. I currently believe that capital punishment should be abolished. My concerns about the death penalty are twofold. First, I worry about the humaneness of the ways in which these executions are carried out; the electric chair, firing squad, and even lethal injection, in my mind fall under the constitutionally prohibited category of cruel and unusual punishment. Second, and probably more troubling, is the fact that many innocent people have died by capital punishment and many more sit on Death Row currently. The case in Texas, where Clarence Brandley was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death by racist circumstances for the rape and murder of Cheryl Dee Ferguson is only one instance among many where innocent individuals are “railroaded” by the police and the district attorney or wrongly convicted by a “jury of their peers”. In some cases, these people are spared by appeal; in others, they die in their innocence, failed by a system established to protect the innocent and punish the guilty. They have been betrayed by our judicial system and had one of their most basic rights, the right to life, taken away by a government that should, above all, protect that right. How does this happen? How does the judicial system, with its focus on rights and proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt send an innocent person to Death Row? It is because the system is rife with perverse incentives; for prosecutors, the incentive is to achieve a 100% conviction rate, for judges, the political pressure to reduce crime often results in stiffer sentences, and many defendants are defended by public defenders, who have little incentive to win. The result is that aggressive prosecution leads to false convictions, and many worthy appeals go unheard for lack of resources. With this in mind, we should stop use of the death penalty in every state and work toward a more reversible form of punishment.