I Am Troy Davis: Discussion and Study Guide

Death Penalty Facts

We’ve learned a lot about the death penalty in the last 30 years. For three decades, we have tinkered with the death penalty in an effort to make it fair, accurate, and effective. Yet the system continues to fail.

Innocent Lives in the Balance

• Since 1973, at least people 197 were freed after evidence showed they were sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit. These are just the wrongful convictions that we know about. How many others were not so lucky?
• Innocent people are sentenced to death due to mistaken eyewitnesses, incompetent lawyers, incorrect or fraudulent forensics, unreliable jailhouse informants, coerced confessions, and more.
• Many death row exonerations have come only because of the extraordinary efforts of people working outside the system – pro bono lawyers, family members, even students.
• Innocent people have spent up to 33 years awaiting execution, or come within hours of execution, before the truth came to light. Any effort to streamline the process or cut appeals will only increase the risk that an innocent person will be executed.

Fair and Equal Before the Law?

• We all expect justice to be blind – otherwise it’s not justice at all. Yet geography, poverty, and race continue to determine who lives and who dies.
• The majority of those on death row are too poor to afford an attorney.
• The death penalty is a lottery of geography. A similar murder might get 40 years in one county and death in the next county over. A majority of executions come from just 2% of the counties in the U.S.
• The victim’s race profoundly affects the sentence. Over 80% of those executed in the U.S. were convicted of killing a white person, even though African Americans are the victims in half of all homicides.
• Some communities keep people of color off of juries. In Houston County, Alabama, 80% of qualified African Americans have been struck by prosecutors from death penalty cases.

Neither Swift Nor Sure

• To be meaningful, justice should be swift and sure. The death penalty is neither. Indeed, a full two-thirds of all death penalty cases are reversed for serious error. The long and complicated process has prolonged the pain of victims’ families and devoured millions of crime-fighting dollars that could save lives and protect the public.
• Every state that has ever studied the cost of the death penalty has found it to be more expensive than alternatives like life without parole – often millions of dollars more.
• The death penalty process is more complicated because a life is on the line, involving far more lawyers, witnesses, experts, pre-trial motions, and court time – racking up exorbitant costs even before a single appeal is filed.
• The death penalty’s high costs add up to more than just dollars. The time spent pursuing one capital case could solve and prosecute scores of other non-capital cases. Meanwhile, the critical needs of victims’ families for services like specialized grief counseling are severely underfunded.
• The death penalty drags victims’ families through an agonizing and lengthy process that forces them to relive the crime over and over again, leaving them in limbo for years.

A New Set of Victims

• The mythology is that executions heal wounds, but studies and individual experiences suggest that executions inflict more wounds than they heal.
• Corrections officials, haunted by the experience of putting people to death, have committed suicide, turned to alcohol, or suffered mental and physical health problems.
• Many journalists have reported symptoms of anxiety, nausea, and nightmares after witnessing an execution.
• Jurors who serve on death penalty trials endure prolonged distress as a result of determining whether someone should live or die.
• Every execution leaves a family behind – a son or daughter who doesn’t understand why their parent was executed, a grieving mother who will never hear the voice of her child again. Theirs are among the hidden stories of capital punishment.

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