The Death Penalty...an Absolute Punishment in an Imperfect System

Last Week Troy Anthony Davis died or, more accurately, was killed, as a result of being convicted of First Degree Premeditated Murder.  I am not a supporter of the death penalty.  This is a rather odd position to have given the fact that I have been a police officer and detective in the past, but it is my position nonetheless.  I have a few very specific reasons for my opposition to the death penalty, each of which I will outline in separate posts.  The first is absolute punishments in imperfect systems.

In this country, to date, we have released approximately 139 men from death rows due to their being proven innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted and sentenced to death.  The reasons for these erroneous convictions run the gambit, from bad eyewitness identifications to deliberate and willful prosecutorial misconduct; the latter being particularly heinous, for which has been reserved a special level of Dante’s Hell, in my opinion.  Let me be very clear, I am not talking about individuals whose convictions have been overturned on so-called “technicalities.”  No, I am talking about people that did not, could not and never did commit the crime for which they were sentenced to die.  Though there are some that consider innocence a technicality, like Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Regardless of the reason for a wrongful conviction, it points out one glaring reality; the criminal justice system in this country is not perfect.  Occasionally, we do get it wrong, and for a number of different reasons.  What I cannot understand is how we justify this imperfect system applying an absolute punishment.

The perfect example of convicting the innocent is the rape-murder case in which the witnesses identify the suspect, pick him out of the line-up and testify in trial that he is the guy that did it.  He gets convicted and sentenced to death.  Years later, the DNA evidence gets analyzed and there is no way that he did it.  The victim was the victim of one assailant, one perpetrator, and the guy our system convicted is not, could not and never has been the guy.

Using the most conservative numbers, the math says that 4.2% of the death row population in this country has been released on grounds of innocence.  People, that is 4 innocent persons for every 100 convictions!!  Hell, let us give the benefit of the doubt to the system and say it is only 1 of 100; who gets to be the one who “takes one for the team” so we can feel safer as a society?  If the cops knock on your door and arrest you and you are the statistical “one” how do you feel about it now?  Let me change it slightly and ask, if your son or daughter becomes the statistical “one”; how do you feel?  Oh, and the response, “That would ever happen to me.” is a wrong answer.  Remember, the people who got released from death row likely thought that right up until they realized what was happening to them.

We are not talking about statistical errors here; we are talking about human beings that would be irrevocably, irretrievably and absolutely dead, having been killed for crimes they did not commit.  If this does not bother you or make you squirm at least a little, I suggest you seek professional help. You are quite likely a sociopath with no ability to feel empathy, and you need help.  If you are like a lot of people who justify it on the grounds, “Well, he deserved it for some crime he never got caught for.”  Again, you need professional help, for you are morally bankrupt.  We should punish people for crimes that we have no way of knowing they occurred, what the crime was and whether or not this person did it?  This logic is evil and you should be ashamed of yourself, but are probably too incredibly stupid.  I welcome the insults I anticipate for that one.

I know there are those that believe the fact that we have discovered the fact that people who are innocent were convicted and sentenced to death is an indication that the system is working.  Well, it ain’t.  How many people did we execute before we even had the technology of DNA to prove people innocent?  What will be the next technology that is used to prove people did not commit a crime and will it prove that we have executed innocent people?  Interesting question, isn’t it?

It has long been said that if we can prove that we have executed an innocent person that would spell the end of the death penalty in this country.  So, what has been the reaction of the system in this regard?  The system zealously prevents the likelihood that we will ever be able to prove we have, in fact, put an innocent man to death.  Even before the convicted person is executed, the prosecutor of the case prepares a Motion to destroy all the evidence in the case.  Within days, or even hours, of the execution, the prosecutors present this Motion to the Court, which is always granted and the Court issues an Order that all the evidence be destroyed.  The hypocrisy of this act is incredible and serves only one purpose, to make sure that we never are able to prove, posthumously, that an innocent person has been killed by the system.  It is the ultimate act of self-protection.

Allow me to put things in some perspective regarding how our system views “justice”.  Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote, in a dissenting opinion, thank God, “This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent”.  In other words, it is pretty much okey dokey to execute an innocent man according to Scalia.  Allow me to parse words regarding his use of the term “convince” which is designed to deliberately imply that a later finding that the system might have made a mistake is, per se, erroneous.  Justice Scalia engages in a kind of abhorrent intellectual dishonesty that is designed to uphold the system, regardless of flaws and imperfections, to allow the imposition of absolute punishments with an imperfect system.

We have the means in our system to guarantee the protection of society that does not involve executing people.  It is called “Life Imprisonment Without Parole.”  We throw people in jail and figuratively throw away the key.  If, years down the road, the technology is developed to determine they are innocent, we can let them go free.  If we are feeling particularly guilty, we can even give them money for the time they spent in prison for a crime they did not commit, but we have yet to figure out how to raise the dead.  If someone is in prison and they did it, they stay there and society is safe.  You have to then reduce the rationale for it to what it is, revenge, anger and retribution and I am not sure this is a morally acceptable reason to kill people.  Would it work for an individual?  Not that I can figure.  So let’s just lock ‘em up as opposed to killin’ ‘em. It’s cheaper too.

In future posts, I shall expound on the economics of execution, and the morality and hypocrisy of the death penalty.