Once a year or so, the news is awash with discussion and controversy regarding the application of the death penalty in capital cases.
The execution of Georgia inmate Troy Davis for the 1989 murder of off-duty police officer Mark MacPhail was in the national spotlight last week as Davis maintained his innocence and exercised his rights of appeal and pleas for a stay of his execution right until the end.
The evidence responsible for convicting Davis did not contain any forensic samples and the ballistic evidence tying Davis to another shooting was connected to a weapon that was never recovered, so there were no fingerprints. One witness was with Davis that night, and several of the other witnesses had been drinking heavily that night.
This type of evidence paired with Davis’ maintaining his innocence causes one to question both his conviction and his sentence. If indeed Davis was innocent, we’ll likely never know now.
The execution of a person is a very final solution, one that finds its roots in man’s desire for revenge and justice dating back to the 18th century B.C.E. While we no longer stone people for homosexuality or boil them to death for refusing to obey church doctrine, we electrocute and lethally inject those convicted of murder.
The argument that our method of death is a vast improvement is true, but method is less important than the ethics of actually killing someone in retaliation for crime.
The Department of Justice indicates that more than 138 death row inmates have been exonerated since 1973. These people were going to be put to death based on various kinds of faulty evidence leading to unjust convictions. These lives are safe, but we have executed an untold number of innocent people, and that threat should be the greatest reason of all to abolish the death penalty in the U.S.
DNA can certainly provide nearly irrefutable evidence to establish guilt, but what about cases where there is no DNA evidence and eyewitness testimony is the word on which men are put to death?
Over half of those exonerated were convicted on eyewitness testimony. The Innocence Project provides evidence of why eyewitness testimony is so unreliable. With this being true, we certainly should not send people to death on testimony that has great potential to be false.
A 2009 Gallup Poll indicates that two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty. Vengeance is a terrible motivator for the astonishing level of support that capital punishment has in this country.
While this is an understandable emotion after the murder of someone close to you, this desire comes from our most basic selves, a self that is violent, selfish and base. The killing of a murderer does not bring peace to the family of the victim, it does not bring a loved one back and it does not take away the hurt, anger and sadness of those left behind.
Some argue that the death penalty is a deterrent to criminals, but most empirical evidence indicates that isn’t true. According to a 2008 study at University of Colorado, 88 percent of criminologists find that threat of execution does not lower homicide rates.
With the unacceptably high likelihood of killing innocent people, the knowledge that people don’t receive some sort of relief from the execution of their loved one’s killer, and the understanding that the desire for vengeance and death in retaliation stems from our most base and detestable human selves, the death penalty should be abolished. It is dangerous for our society to embrace something so final and based on emotion. As Gandhi said, “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”
Reach the columnist at page.gerrick@asu.edu
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