People are asking...

A system that finds serious error in seven out of every 10 sentences can hardly be described as “working.” A high reversal rate means higher costs for the state and painful delays for victims’ families. It is also a red flag that something is terribly wrong with the system.

The 140 innocent people who were sentenced to die and later released had to fight long legal battles before the truth was finally heard. In many cases luck was a big factor in their release – another crime that happened to lead to the real killer, for example, or even journalism students uncovering evidence as part of a class project. Those exonerated will tell you they were not freed because of the system, they were freed in spite of it.

As long as the death penalty is an option, there is a real and unacceptable risk of executing an innocent person. Plus, a death penalty that is so rarely used is little more than a cruel hoax on victims’ families, who are promised one punishment at the time their loved one is killed but often will never see an execution take place. And a death penalty that is virtually never used is just another name for life without parole – at an exorbitantly greater cost.

There is no evidence that the death penalty deters crime any more or less than other harsh punishments like life in prison without parole.

If the death penalty deterred, one would expect the South – where executions are frequent, to have lower murder rates than other regions, and for states with the death penalty to be safer than those states without. In fact, the opposite is true. Regions with the most executions also have the highest murder rates.1 And states without the death penalty actually have lower murder rates than those with the death penalty. Those states have also done better than death penalty states in reducing their murder rates.2

This isn’t surprising: to the extent someone with a deadly weapon in a rage is going to be deterred from anything, the real prospect of spending a lifetime in prison is at least as persuasive as the small chance of getting executed. There is simply no correlation between murder rates and the death penalty, and nearly two-thirds of Americans agree that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent.3

A recent batch of studies have come out claiming that the death penalty deters. These studies have come under intense attack in the research world for their faulty methods, missing data, misleading categorization, and a host of other problems that make the data completely unreliable.

1. 1. Murder rates based on the years 2001 to 2006. FBI’s 2006 Uniform Crime Report, cited by the Death Penalty Information Center. Law enforcement murder rates based on the years 1996 to 2006. FBI’s 2006 Uniform Crime Report - Law Enforcement Officers Feloniously Killed, Table 1.
2. 2. Murder rates based on the years 1996 to 2007. FBI’s 2007 Uniform Crime Report, cited by the Death Penalty Information Center.
3. 3. 62% of American polled, Gallup May 2004.

Many murder victims’ families do not support the death penalty. Some oppose it in principle, while others feel that the system is extremely harmful to survivors because it is so cumbersome and lengthy while failing to provide them with the resources they really need to move forward.

Sadly, many victims’ families learned this lesson the hard way: they wanted the death penalty at the time of their loved ones’ murder but then saw firsthand how the process prolonged their pain. Families still processing the shock of a murder are in no position to evaluate how the long process will effect them years down the road.

We owe it to families of murder victims to have in place a system of justice that is swift and sure, and to provide them with meaningful services to help them heal and recover from the trauma of murder. The death penalty has proven time and again to fail on every one of those counts.

No. In fact, the death penalty has nothing to do with prison safety. Proper staffing, equipment, programming, and classification are the keys to making prisons safe and preventing prison murder.

Lifers in particular have an incentive not to cause trouble in prison, because they must make prison their homes for life. Trouble jeopardizes the few privileges they can secure in the prison world, and they must stay on the good side of guards who will control their every move until the day they die. For those few lifers who do cause trouble, corrections officers will tell you that it is always possible to make life more difficult for an inmate – including isolation, which can be much more agonizing than the prospect of an execution.

No. The death penalty has not proven to save the lives of law enforcement. In fact, there are more police officers killed in the south than any other region in the country, even though the south is home to the majority of executions in the U.S.

The best way to keep police officers safe is to ensure proper staffing, equipment, and training to officers and to implement crime prevention programs that work. The death penalty is a distraction from those concrete needs, diverting millions of law enforcement dollars that could be used to keep police and the public safe.

No. In fact, the death penalty can actually impede the fight against terrorism. It makes martyrs out of terrorists (many of whom sought to die for their vicious acts anyway), emboldening their followers to recruit more people to their cause. Meanwhile, many of our allies have refused to extradite terrorists to the United States because of our death penalty system, preventing us from prosecuting or even interrogating them. And finally, executing terrorists sends these criminal masterminds to their grave with a wealth of intelligence that could one day help prevent other terrorist plots.

Terrorism is not an ordinary crime that can be addressed with standard law enforcement tools and resources at the local level. It requires a complex solution that integrates law enforcement with intelligence, defense, diplomacy, and foreign policy considerations. The death penalty often gets in the way of the effort to balance these considerations, especially at the state level.

Using death as a billy club to secure plea bargains is not only unnecessary, it’s dangerous. Many murders are resolved by plea bargains – whether or not the death penalty is on the table.

The threat of death also increases the risk of convicting the innocent. There are documented cases of innocent people confessing to crimes they did not commit simply to avoid a death sentence. They often spent years in prison before the truth was uncovered.

Life and death are too important to be used as a bargaining chip – and the evidence suggests that guilty pleas are frequent even without such coercion.

A moratorium is like a time-out on executions for a certain period of time. Often a moratorium is put in place while the death penalty’s many problems are studied and addressed. The only thing on hold during a moratorium is the actual execution – no one is removed from death row and prosecutors are free to seek death sentences.

A moratorium is different from repealing the death penalty because it brings together people on all sides of the issue, including those who support the death penalty, to take an objective look at how the system is working and what can be done about it.

Many states use the death penalty infrequently. The legal process in death cases involves so many steps that it is normal for states to go a long time without executions while cases make their way through the court system. In other instances, courts issue rulings that put executions on hold while a legal issue is resolved.

These kinds of execution gaps are different from an official moratorium. They do not provide any mechanism for examining or addressing the death penalty’s flaws. And they do not give citizens any role in the process of determining how the death penalty is working or what to do about it. They can end at any time, whether those flaws have been dealt with or not, because they governed by court procedures and are completely outside the policy and public spheres.