Why execution is wrong

The death penalty in America is a flawed, expensive policy, defined by bias and error. It targets the most vulnerable people in our society and corrupts the integrity of our criminal justice system.

From police officers to family members of murder victims, Americans are recognizing that the death penalty does not make us safer.

EJI provides legal assistance to people on death row, many of whom are innocent or wrongly convicted. We provide representation at trial, on appeal, and in postconviction proceedings to people facing execution. We have documented widespread racial bias in the administration of the death penalty and we challenge racial discrimination in jury selection, sentencing, and throughout the system.

We protect vulnerable people facing execution, including people with mental illness who are uniquely at risk, and we produce reports about capital punishment and the ways in which public safety can be undermined by relying on this expensive and flawed punishment.

For every nine people executed, one person on death row has been exonerated. The same factors drive wrongful convictions in non-capital cases and death penalty cases, including:. A record exonerations in involved witnesses who lied on the stand or falsely accused the defendant.

In 50 of these cases, the defendant was falsely accused of a crime that never happened. Official misconduct is more common in death penalty cases, especially if the defendant is Black. The intense pressure to obtain a death sentence and the political stakes for police, prosecutors, and even judges can cause serious legal errors that contribute to wrongful convictions and death sentences. In Alabama alone, over death sentences have been invalidated by state and federal courts, resulting in conviction of a lesser offense or a lesser sentence on retrial.

Inadequate legal assistance, racial bias, and prosecutorial indifference to innocence make Mr. The failure to provide adequate counsel to capital defendants and people sentenced to death is a defining feature of the American death penalty. Whether a defendant will be sentenced to death typically depends on the quality of his legal team more than any other factor. Some lawyers provide outstanding representation to capital defendants. But few defendants facing capital charges can afford to hire an attorney, so they are appointed lawyers who are frequently overworked, underpaid, and inexperienced in trying death penalty cases.

Capital cases are especially complex, time-intensive, and financially draining. Lawyers representing indigent capital defendants often face enormous caseloads, caps on fees, and a critical lack of resources for investigation and expert assistance.

Too often they fail to adequately investigate cases, call witnesses, and challenge forensic evidence. Capital defense l awyers have slept through parts of trial, shown up in court intoxicated, or done no work to prepare for sentencing. Inadequate defense lawyers contribute to wrongful convictions and death sentences, and by failing to object at trial, they make it harder to correct errors on appeal.

That leaves people sentenced to death with little hope for relief in postconviction proceedings, where they have to present new evidence and navigate complicated procedural rules. Jones signed a confession after several hours of police interrogation, but he later claimed the confession was coerced. In the mids, the policeman who arrested Jones and the detective who took his confession were forced out of uniform for ethical violations.

Many witnesses came forward pointing to another suspect in the case. On June 23, , Gary Graham was executed in Texas, despite claims that he was innocent. Graham was 17 when he was charged with the robbery and shooting of Bobby Lambert outside a Houston supermarket.

Three of the jurors who voted to convict Graham signed affidavits saying they would have voted differently had all of the evidence been available. The tests revealed that a strand of hair found at the scene of a liquor-store shooting did not belong to Jones, as was originally implied by the prosecution. Instead, the hair belonged to the victim.

The strand of hair was the only piece of physical evidence that placed Jones at the scene of the crime, and this revelation raises the question of whether Texas executed the wrong person for the murder. The necessary DNA technology had not been developed at the time the crime in , but was available in Both courts, along with then-Governor George W. Bush, denied Jones a stay of execution. Apparently, Gov. Bush was not even informed by his clemency advisors about the request for the DNA test.

Unreliable forensic science and a completely inadequate post-conviction review process cost Claude Jones his life. In , Judge Paul Murphy ruled in favor of the Observer and the innocence groups and ordered prosecutors to turn over the evidence for DNA testing. I hope these results will serve as a wakeup call to everyone that serious problems exist in the criminal justice system that must be fixed if our society is to continue using the death penalty.

Bush left office to become President. The independent investigation, reported by the Chicago Tribune, found that prosecutors and arson investigators used arson theories that have since been repudiated by scientific advances. Willingham was executed in in Texas despite his consistent claims of innocence. He was convicted of murdering his three children in a house fire. It was just a fire. Willingham was convicted of capital murder after arson investigators concluded that 20 indicators of arson led them to believe that an accelerent had been used to set three separate fires inside his home.

Among the only other evidence presented by prosecutors during the the trial was testimony from jailhouse snitch Johnny E. Webb, a drug addict on psychiatric medication, who claimed Willingham had confessed to him in the county jail. Evidence discovered years after the Willingham execution showed that the prosecution had given Webb favorable treatment, then deliberately elicited perjured testimony from Webb that he had been promised and given nothing for his testimony.

The Marshall Project, August 3, Some of the jurors who convicted Willingham were troubled when told of the new case review. Now I will have to live with this for the rest of my life. Maybe this man was innocent. No relief was granted and Willingham was executed on February 17, The experts noted that the evidence in the Willingham case was nearly identical to the evidence used to exonerate Willis.

Chicago Tribune, December 9, Did Texas execute an innocent man? Sedley Alley was convicted and sentenced to death in for the rape and murder of Lance Cpl. The lawyers appointed to represent him at trial failed to investigate glaring inconsistencies between the physical evidence and a confession Alley consistently said had been coerced.

Instead, with no prior history of mental illness, they argued that he suffered from a multiple-personality disorder and was not guilty by reason of insanity.

In , after Alley had lost his appeals, new lawyers were appointed to represent him in clemency proceedings. Based on these discoveries, they asked for DNA testing of clothing and the murder weapon.

Instead, Bredesen directed the lawyers to present their request for testing to the Tennessee courts, which refused to allow the testing to occur. Alley were alive today, he would be entitled to DNA testing under the … statute. One US Supreme Court Justice who had originally supported the death penalty eventually came to the conclusion that capital punishment was bound to damage the cause of justice:. The death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake Experience has taught us that the constitutional goal of eliminating arbitrariness and discrimination from the administration of death Jurors in many US death penalty cases must be 'death eligible'.

This means the prospective juror must be willing to convict the accused knowing that a sentence of death is a possibility. This results in a jury biased in favour of the death penalty, since no one who opposes the death penalty is likely to be accepted as a juror. There's much concern in the USA that the legal system doesn't always provide poor accused people with good lawyers.

Out of all offenders who are sentenced to death, three quarters of those who are allocated a legal aid lawyer can expect execution, a figure that drops to a quarter if the defendant could afford to pay for a lawyer. Regardless of the moral status of capital punishment, some argue that all ways of executing people cause so much suffering to the condemned person that they amount to torture and are wrong. Many methods of execution are quite obviously likely to cause enormous suffering, such as execution by lethal gas, electrocution or strangulation.

Other methods have been abandoned because they were thought to be barbaric, or because they forced the executioner to be too 'hands-on'. These include firing squads and beheading.

Many countries that use capital punishment have now adopted lethal injection, because it's thought to be less cruel for the offender and less brutalising for the executioner. Those against capital punishment believe this method has serious moral flaws and should be abandoned. The first flaw is that it requires medical personnel being directly involved in killing rather than just checking that the execution has terminated life.

This is a fundamental contravention of medical ethics. The second flaw is that research in April showed that lethal injection is not nearly as 'humane' as had been thought. Post mortem findings indicated that levels of anaesthetic found in offenders were consistent with wakefulness and the ability to experience pain.

This is really more of a political argument than an ethical one. It's based on the political principle that a state should fulfil its obligations in the least invasive, harmful and restrictive way possible. Most people will not want to argue with clauses 1 and 2, so this structure does have the benefit of focussing attention on the real point of contention - the usefulness of non-capital punishments in the case of murder.

One way of settling the issue is to see whether states that don't use capital punishment have been able to find other punishments that enable the state to punish murderers in such a ways as to preserve an orderly and contented society.

If such states exist then capital punishment is unnecessary and should be abolished as overly harmful. The idea that we must be punished for any act of wrongdoing, whatever its nature, relies upon a belief in human free will and a person's ability to be responsible for their own actions. If one does not believe in free will, the question of whether it is moral to carry out any kind of punishment and conversely reward arises. Arthur Koestler and Clarence Darrow argued that human beings never act freely and thus should not be punished for even the most horrific crimes.

The latter went on to argue for the abolition of punishment altogether, an idea which most people would find problematic. Search term:.

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This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Ethics guide. Arguments against capital punishment. On this page Value of human life Right to live Execution of the innocent Retribution is wrong Failure to deter Brutalising society Expense People not responsible for their acts Applied unfairly Cruel, inhumane, degrading Unnecessary Free will Page options Print this page.

Value of human life Everyone thinks human life is valuable. Right to live Everyone has an inalienable human right to life, even those who commit murder; sentencing a person to death and executing them violates that right. But this time the sentencing judge ruled that a life sentence was appropriate, not death. They mortgaged their house, and the family hired their own lawyer to look into the physical evidence collected during the original investigation.

A man named Kenneth Phillips, who lived less than a mile from the bar where Ancona was killed, had left his DNA on clothes Ancona had been wearing. Phillips was easy to find: He already was in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a seven-year-old girl.

Gary Drinkard was no choirboy. When I spoke with Drinkard, he reminded me of a weather-beaten man straight out of a Merle Haggard song. He wore coveralls and chain-smoked Newports. He spoke slowly and guardedly in a deep southern drawl. He grew exasperated only when I asked him to describe his time on death row.

That certainly seemed to be the plan. Drinkard was found guilty in and sentenced to death. He would spend close to six years on death row. It provided him with legal counsel. A county jury found Drinkard not guilty within one hour, and he was released. There have been more than 2, exonerations overall in the U. In Kirk Bloodsworth was the first person in the nation to be exonerated from death row based on DNA evidence. Bloodsworth was arrested in and charged with raping and murdering Dawn Hamilton, a nine-year-old girl, near Baltimore, Maryland.

Police were alerted to Bloodsworth, who had just moved to the area, when an anonymous tipster reported him after seeing a televised police sketch of the suspect. Bloodsworth bore little resemblance to the suspect in the police sketch. No physical evidence linked him to the crime. Yet Bloodsworth was convicted and sentenced to death based primarily on the testimony of five witnesses, including an eight-year-old and a year-old, who said they could place him near the murder scene.

Witness misidentification is a factor in many wrongful convictions, according to the DPIC. He was granted a second trial nearly two years later, after it was shown on appeal that prosecutors had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from his defense, namely that police had identified another suspect but failed to pursue that lead. Again, Bloodsworth was found guilty. A different sentencing judge handed Bloodsworth two life sentences, rather than death.

I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison. That book, The Blooding, describes the then emerging science of DNA testing and how law enforcement had first used it to both clear suspects and solve a rape and murder case. When he asked whether DNA evidence could be tested to prove that he was not at the crime scene, he was told the evidence had been destroyed inadvertently.

Prosecutors, sure of their case, agreed to release the items. It would be almost another decade before the actual killer was charged. Today Bloodsworth is the executive director of WTI and a tireless campaigner against capital punishment. Sabrina Butler discovered that Walter, her nine-month-old son, had stopped breathing shortly before midnight on April 11, An year-old single mother, Butler responded with urgent CPR. When the child could not be revived after several minutes, she raced him to a hospital in Columbus, Mississippi, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Less than 24 hours later she was charged with murder. Walter had serious internal injuries when he died. Butler told police investigators she believed that the injuries were caused by her efforts to revive him. Eleven months later Butler was convicted of murder and sentenced to die.

All that I had been told by my attorneys was to sit quietly and look at the jury. A new trial was ordered.

The second trial, with better lawyers, working pro bono, resulted in exoneration.