When you turn on the television, radio, or open the local newspaper, you are overwhelmed with news of arrests, murders, homicides, and other tragedies. There are manythings that I don’t agree with in today’s society but, out of all the wrong doing that takes place, I believe murder including the death penalty is the worst of them. I am strongly against the deathpenalty because it violates God’s rules, costs the tax payers too much money, and possibly the “wrongly accused,” may have to die because of the cruel and unusual punishment of the death penalty.
Amnesty International and anti-death penalty activists like Sister Helen Prejean have some very strong arguments against capital punishment, which have often been made in the past but should be reiterated. Probably the strongest argument against executions is that they are final, and they cannot be undone once they have been carried, no matter if the person was innocent all along. When the state commits ‘legal’ murder, the individual is just as dead as any homicide victim, and that crime can never be rectified. No one knows exactly how many innocent persons really have been executed in the U.S. over the years, but Prejean knew of at least two in her own experience, and over 100 people have been freed from death row since 1973 because they were later found to be innocent. A related problem is that the criminal justice system simply does not give due process and equal justice under the law to the poor and members of minority groups, and this has always been the case in the United States. They have far less access to competent legal counsel and expert witnesses, and all-white juries are more likely to convict members of minority groups and sentence them to death. Another group that is not receiving equal justice consists of the very large number of mentally ill and mentally retarded persons who have been sentenced to death over the years, even though they may never have had adequate treatment for their problems and were probably not fully responsible for the crimes. These are the most powerful reasons to abolish the death penalty, as even the Supreme Court and the American Bar Association have recognized from time to time over the years, although another reason would be that death sentences also inflict severe trauma on the families of those who have been executed, even if their suffering goes almost completely unrecognized.
Sister Helen Prejean, an anti-death penalty activist, witnessed the executions of two men she knew to be innocent, Dobie Williams and James O’Dell. This is perhaps the strongest argument of all against capital punishment, for once an innocent person is executed, the state itself has committed murder, and it is a crime that can never be undone. When she started working with death row inmates, Prejean just assumed they really were all guilty, but notes that “I know a lot better how the criminal justice system operates and how innocent people can end up of death row” (Prejean 9). Since 1973, at least 117 innocent people have been freed from death row after having been proved innocent, while an unknown number have been executed. Even the American Bar Association called for an end to executions because poor and minority defendants simply were not receiving due process and equal justice in the courts (Prejean 17). This is hardly a new problem in the U.S., and the Supreme Court has recognized this fact many times in capital punishment cases. Prosecutorial misconduct is the most common reason for wrongful convictions and executions, particularly with minority and indigent persons who cannot afford their own attorneys and expert witnesses. Dobie Williams had a lawyer who was later disbarred for ethics violations, and did not even file an appeal on the basis that his client was a black man convicted by an all-white jury in Louisiana (Prejean 19). Williams was nowhere near the scene of the murder for which he was convicted, and the police lied about how he had confessed to the crime verbally, and could not even agree on the statements he had made to them.
In Massachusetts, Lawyer Johnson was twenty years old in 1972 when he was convicted and sentenced to death for a murder he did not commit, and spent ten years in prison before being exonerated. A witness finally came forward to admit that he had not killed the victim, but rather a man who had been involved in a drug deal. Johnson later became an artist and an activist against the death penalty, but the experience of prison had damaged him for life. He was “embarrassed at having been incarcerated” for ten years, even though he was innocent (Burnett 2012). Although he had tried to tell the prosecutors that others had framed him for the murder, and that “it was pretty common for some of the tough guys in the neighborhood to use me and guys like me as scapegoats”, as a young black man no one believed him (Burnett 2012). Johnson had never used drugs before he went to jail, but he was an addict by the time he got out, and the state refused to provide any treatment or rehabilitation. Prison had so damaged him that he sometimes sought ways just to be sent back because he had become accustomed to it and had great difficulty functioning on the outside. After his experiences there, Johnson was no longer able to form friendships or romantic attachments, or even engage in normal social life and conversations. It was not until 2008 that he finally received $500,000 in compensation from Massachusetts, and until that time he had simply been living with his mother with only a small monthly income from disability checks (Burnett 2012). Being freed was not really a panacea for Johnson, and indeed there is no way to repair or atone for all the traumas he suffered as a result of his wrongful conviction and death sentence. Had he been executed, of course, it might never have been known that he was innocent at all.
All family members of the victims of murder and violence also suffer severe damage and trauma that lasts for a lifetime and this is also true of the relatives of those who have been executed. They are as much the victims of the system as those whose loved ones have been murdered, but they are “shadow victims” or “hidden victims” who mostly go unnoticed and unrecognized (Creating More Victims 21). Many of them have lost faith in the criminal justice system and society as a whole since they seem to have violated moral principles like “thou shalt not kill”, or the concept that “a civilized society doesn’t go around killing people” (Creating More Victims 6). Surviving relatives of people who have been executed also face problems like public shame, humiliation, depression, alcoholism and drug abuse, which are also common with the families or homicide victims. These relatives still feel the strain for years or decades after the executions have taken place, and the memories have very negative effects on their personal lives and relationships. Very often, the persons being executed also had very long histories of mental retardation, substance abuse or mental illnesses like paranoid schizophrenia and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but the healthcare system in the U.S. simply offers little or no treatment for these problems to people who are poor and uninsured. When they commit crimes, the courts almost always fail to recognize the reality of their physical and psychological problems, even when they are obviously severely disturbed and not fully responsible for their actions (Creating More Victims 12). Relatives of those who have been executed, particularly those who are poor or members of minority groups, also have frequent stories about the blatant unfairness of the criminal justice system and being denied due process and adequate legal representation (Creating More Victims 16). If they were not aware of it before, they soon learn that the indigent and racial minorities are far more likely to be convicted, sentenced to death and executed in the U.S., and this has always been so.
In the U.S. the criminal justice system is unjust and dysfunctional in many ways, and this has been recognized for many years. It was always true that blacks were more likely to be arrested and convicted than whites, and to receive much harsher sentences, including the death penalty, and it is obvious today that the poor and the mentally ill are also not receiving equal and impartial justice under the system. In fact, the U.S. seems to prefer to deal with social and economic problems with more prisons, more police, longer sentences and more use of the death penalty, even though it already stands out as extreme in these matters compared to any other Western nation. No other country incarcerates as large a percentage of its population and every other Western nation has already abolished capital punishment. In this respect as in many others, the U.S. is highly regressive and an outlier compared to the rest of the Western world. Innocent people have indeed been executed, and hundreds of others have been freed after spending many years on death row for crimes they did not commit. They are victims of a corrupt criminal justice system, and frankly have been framed by police and prosecutors. Here again, this seems most common with poor and minority defendants, and therefore there really is no reason that the public should trust this system any more. Certainly it cannot be trusted to make decisions of life and death that will inflict major traumas on the families of persons who have been executed, especially when it is really such a totally biased, unfair and unjust system.
WORKS CITED
Burnett, James H, “The Long, Hard Half-Life of Lawyer Johnson”. Boston Globe, April 8, 2012.
Creating More Victims: How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind. Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights, 2006.
Prejean, Helen. The Death of Innocents: An Eyewitness Account of Wrongful Executions. Random House, 2006.
