Measure for Measure, I don’t wish to appear in your face, here - the statistic you’ve brought up is scary, and damning.
But I wonder, do you believe that death penalty cases are more or less likely to be overturned because of such errors, compared to regular life in prison cases? Whether you think the appeals process, and other protections surrounding death penalty cases work as well as they should, they are much more extravagant than the protections people facing simply life in prison get. And my gut feeling is that if one were wrongfully accused, and sentenced for a crime one did not commit, there’s still a greater chance that in the case of a death penalty case, the truth will come out, than for someone mouldering in jail for the rest of their life without parole.
I think that’s what keeps the errors in the judicial system with respect to death penalty cases from being a convincing argument against the death penalty for me. Unless the protections for death penalty cases are extended to all cases where someone might face life in prison, I don’t see that destroying someone’s life because of a judicial mistake is any better or worse if that destruction happens after twenty years on death row, followed by an execution, or after living a long fifty years in custody, then dying a natural death. In both cases an innocent has had their life and liberty taken from them unjustly. Both are travesties. If you honestly believe it’s acceptable to have people incarcerated for the rest of their lives for crimes they can’t be proven to have committed, that it’s better than killing them outright, I can’t argue your premises. I don’t entirely agree, but it’s a position I can’t say is wrong, either. I guess what I’m trying to say is that no matter what the degree of jeopardy for an accused, there’s always going to be an error rate within the courts, even assuming everyone involved is honest, competent, and doing their best. (Which I know is a sometimes generous assumption.)
The statistic I’ve heard for death penalty cases is that approximately one in seven such sentences will be overturned on appeal, often leaving the public at serious doubt as to the person’s guilt at all for the crime they’d been accused of. But if that’s the case with the death penalty, can you convince me, given the protections that death penalty defenders have, that I shouldn’t believe that at least that fraction of people who are jailed for lesser sentences that shouldn’t have been?
I remain of the opinion that the way to deal with the problem isn’t to eliminate the death penalty, but rather to work to improve the protections in the judicial system as a whole. But that’s going to be more expensive, too. Morally I think it’s a no-brainer concept. But it’s hard to get the public to accept such an expense. And even harder when the effect that the public will see is, by definition, a reduction in convictions at trial. For the most part, it seems to me that the public doesn’t care why John Doe has had his conviction overturned - it’s always the appeals court’s fault. Unless it’s something so egregious, such as bribery or the like, on the part of the prosecuting attorney. With DAs being elected officials, maintaining a high conviction rate is vitally important to them. Overturns on appeal are nowhere near as important in the public perception game. (Though such does affect the attorney’s professional reputation, AIUI.) Right now, I do believe that we have a system where DAs, especially in high profile cases, will prefer to get a flawed conviction, even if they know it will be overturned on appeal, because it demonstrates their comittment to “Law and Order.” And that’s an attitude that I think helps to put a large number of people into jail whom really shouldn’t have been adjudged guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, at all levels of the penal system, not simply at the death penalty level.
Unless we can correct that bias, I beleive that simply removing the death penalty will only have the effect of making sure that no innocent persons are executed. It will do nothing, necessarily, to prevent the same innocent from being tossed into jail for the rest of their lives. And with a lesser likelihood of having their erronious conviction overturned, than if they’d been on death row. As your links prove, there are a number of very competent people who care enough about the morality of the death penalty to try to make sure no one who is innocent is killed. I’m not convinced that there’s the same institutionalized concern for lifers. (I’m aware that the Innocence Project does do work on cases that don’t need to involve the death penalty, but most of the judicial watchdog groups I’m aware of seem focused solely on inmates facing the death penalty. And I fear that funding for those groups would dry up without the percieved threat of execution.