Growing up in Texas taught me that Americans love their death penalties but I still find these kinds of numbers disturbing:
An October 13th Gallup Poll found that more than half of all Americans who support the death penalty believe that someone innocent has been executed in the past five years. (About two-thirds of Americans support capital punishment, a figure that has been steady for years.) David Dow, the director of the Innocence Project of Texas, argues that this is not surprising. "Most people, whether they’re death penalty supporters or not, are going to acknowledge that the system makes mistakes," he says. He argues that for capital punishment, as with everything else, it comes down to a cost question: can a state afford to execute people, with all the years of legal wrangling that usually entails?The economic argument made here is a good one but it's the ethical considerations that cause me to object to a state run death penalty. Now this is not to say that I don't believe that there aren't many good reasons to punish a criminal offender by killing them; that isn't my concern. What does bother me are the myriad flaws within our justice system that allow for innocent men and women to be executed: evidence tampering, inaccurate eye witnesses, crime scene contamination, dirty cops, etc. In the face of so many human flaws I just can not countenance putting the power of life and death over American citizens into the hands of our government.
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5 comments:
Add to that the lack of the real desire or political will for many state governors and US presidents to actually /use/ their powers of clemency and pardon in circumstances where it is warranted.
I used to be pretty strongly capital punishment in my teens. I felt that moral absolutes demanded absolutist action. As I matured, I came to understand that even in situations where there is a real moral absolute it can be awfully hard for everyone to correctly discern what it is.
I read of this recently: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/a-case-of-innocence-executed-20091022-h9b9.html
It might interest you.
For what it's worth, there has been no capital punishment in Australia since 1967.
That case was actually the example used in the story I linked to for this post, MP. Disturbing to say the least.
I don't know if you're aware, but the relatively new Dallas DA (Craig Watkins) has basically made it his mission to overturn wrongful convictions based on DNA evidence. He certainly made big waves in his first 6-9 months...
I wouldn't doubt it, one L. DNA evidence has pretty much redefined the US court system over the last decade. Makes you wonder how many other people have been wrongly convicted in the past.
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