Mauritius Message Board: DEATH PENALTY DEBATE- Part II

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DEATH PENALTY DEBATE- Part II

Posted by Bashir E Khan on 27/3/2008, 6:38 pm
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DEATH PENALTY (II)

MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE-Can an innocent person be sent to the gallows ?

If a person is being executed, there can be no margin of error because the execution, once carried out, cannot be reversed afterwards. Among retention countries, the US has by far the most open Criminal Justice system and is continuously scrutinized at all levels. Yet amazingly more and more cases of miscarriages of justice are being reported. This is largely due to advance in DNA testing and its use in forensic investigations.

In 1992 Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld, (1), staff Attorneys of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University founded The Innocence Project to assist prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing. To date, as a direct result of the Innocence Project, 213 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 16 who served time on death row.

There are now Innocence Projects across all the United States of America and the project is being copied in many other countries including the UK and Australia. The Innocence Project followed a groundbreaking study by Columbia Law School (2) that estimated that the U.S. justice system has a failing rate of 5% at all times which means that as many as 100,000 prisoners have been wrongly convicted.

These 2 studies beg the obvious but daunting question : " How many innocent people are in prison ? " Nobody really knows the answer, but it would be reasonable to assume that there are many more innocent people in US prisons.

According to the US Death Penalty Information Center, 96 people have been released from death row since 1973 because it was determined that they had been wrongfully convicted. Some of them were released just days before their execution date ! According to Radelet and Bedau (1998) at least 25 innocent people were executed during the last century.

One may be tempted to scornfully exclaim : " Oh, well the world did not have DNA evidences when these convictions were made. " But in fact " the most common errors were incompetent defense lawyers and police and prosecutors who suppressed evidence. In 37 percent of the trials, appeals courts ruled that defense attorneys performed so poorly that the defendant did not receive a proper defense, and in 16 percent of the cases, prosecutors suppressed mitigating or exculpatory evidence ". (3)

Can the death penalty be equitably applied across all racial, religious, castes and all economic classes ?

Death penalty aside, in all countries where the population is characterized along ethnic, religious or racial lines, especially in countries which host sizeable immigrants, there are always claims of discriminations when it comes to encounters with the Criminal Justice processes. In France, Africans and North Africans (Read Arabs) make up more than 60% of prisoners. The disproportionate numbers of Afro-Americans within their Criminal Justice system is well documented from several sources including Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International reports.

According to the US Bureau of Justice statistics, " at year end 2006 there were 3,042 black male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 black males in the United States, compared to 1,261 Hispanic male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 Hispanic males and 487 white male sentenced prisoners per 100,000 white males ". Afro-Americans make up 13% of the total US population.

In Death Penalty cases the dire reality is stunning. A review in 1990 by the United states General Accounting Office on Death Penalty Sentencing, found that " In 82% of the studies [reviewed], race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty, i. e., those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks. "

Race continues to play a strong role in US death penalty cases, according to a new report by Amnesty International. In US : Death by Discrimination - The Continuing Role of Race in Capital Cases, Amnesty states that : " Even though blacks and whites are murder victims in nearly equal numbers of crimes, 80% of people executed since the death penalty was reinstated have been executed for murders involving white victims. More than 20% of black defendants who have been executed were convicted by all-white juries. "

Several US Universities have arrived at similar conclusions. For example according to the findings of a Governor-commissioned death penalty study conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland, the state's death penalty system " is tainted with racial bias, and geography plays a significant role in who faces a capital conviction ". The study concluded that defendants are much more likely to be sentenced to death if they have killed a white person.

The non-equitable administration of the death penalty is by no means limited to the United States. In the Gulf countries and Singapore where the death penalty is administered heavy handedly for drug related offenses, concern has been raised on the bias against foreigners compared with local residents. Singapore which has the highest execution rate per population size in the world dropped a death penalty sentence against a young German woman after heavy protests from European Countries but an Australian citizen of Vietnamese origin was not so lucky.
In a separate article, I will discuss the issue of death penalty across the world.

Conclusions

This survey has demonstrated the imperfectness of criminal justice processes. The essence of justice is justice itself. The State cannot afford any margin of error. We have seen that in death penalty cases, it is virtually impossible to guarantee against mistakes, in addition to administer it equitably against all biases such as race. Furthermore the so-called deterrent value of the death penalty is based on populist public emotions rather than evidence-based studies. Because most crimes, especially murders, are crimes of passion, often committed under the influence of alcohol and drugs, a safer society should move away from debates about the death penalty towards a crime reduction strategy.
Bashir E Khan, London
For comments : Bashirkhan@aol.com
References :
1. Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld, 1992, The Innocence project at : http : //www. innocenceproject. org/about/Mission-Statement. php)
2. James S Liebman and Jeffrey Fagan, 1991, The Columbia Law School at http : //www2. law. columbia. edu/instructionalservices/liebman/index. html)
3. Radelet, Michael, and Hugo Adam Bedau. 1998. The Execution of the Innocent, Law and Contemporary Problems, 64 : 105-124.