The Real Risk of Executing the Innocent

Since 1973, at least 200 people have been freed after evidence revealed that they were sentenced to die for crimes they did not commit.¹ That's more than one innocent person exonerated for every eight executions. Wrongful convictions rob innocent people of years of their lives, waste tax dollars, and retraumatize the victim's family.

The Truth About Scientific Evidence

• Murder cases often are riddled with problems: mistaken eyewitnesses, bad lawyers, shoddy forensics, unreliable jailhouse informants, coerced confessions, and more.
• When someone is convicted of murder, many people think that DNA has proven their guilt. But DNA evidence exists in only 5-10% of criminal cases.²
• Many types of evidence traditionally used in death penalty cases have lost credibility, including fingerprints, bite marks, ballistics, and hair analyses.³
• When DNA evidence is available, courts can block access to testing, even if it could exonerate someone.
• Scientific evidence is only as reliable as the people testing it. Crime labs from Baltimore to Oklahoma City have come under fire for errors and even fraud in their forensics.

We Can't Be Right 100% of the Time

• The risk of executing an innocent person is not limited to those cases where lawyers fell asleep in trials. Despite the best efforts of police, prosecutors, judges, juries, witnesses, and defense attorneys, mistakes can and do happen.
• Most appeal processes don't catch mistakes. The majority of exonerations happen only because of the extraordinary efforts of people working outside the system — pro bono lawyers, family members, and even students.
• Reform isn't enough for a system so fundamentally flawed. Efforts to reform or streamline the death penalty process or cut appeals only increase the risk that an innocent person will be executed and inflate the consequences of a system deeply rooted in racism that targets marginalized communities.

The Wrong Person: Stories of a Broken System

• Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for setting fire to his home, killing his three children. Experts now say that the arson theories used in the investigation are scientifically invalid. Willingham may very well have been executed for an accidental fire.⁴
• Henry McCollum and Leon Brown were sentenced to death in 1983 for murdering an 11-year old girl in North Carolina. Though no physical evidence linked them to the crime, officials coerced false confessions from McCollum and Brown, both teenagers with intellectual disabilities. Before DNA exonerated them, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia held up the case as justification for capital punishment.⁵
• Frank Lee Smith was sentenced to death in Florida on the testimony of a single witness. No physical evidence tied him to the crime. Four years later, the same witness saw a photo of a different man and realized she had made a mistake. DNA tests later confirmed that Smith was innocent, but it was too late. He had died of pancreatic cancer in prison.⁶
• Troy Davis was executed in Georgia in 2011 for the murder of police officer Mark Allen MacPhail. No physical evidence ever tied him to the crime. His conviction was based on the testimony of nine witnesses – seven of whom later recanted or changed their testimony. Of the two who kept their testimony, one has long been suspected of committing the murder himself.⁷

We've learned a lot about the death penalty in the last 40 years. Innocent people are sentenced to die all the time. We also know that when a state is freed from the death penalty, we can reimagine responses to violence that break cycles of harm, build safety and healing for all, and put us on the road to ending mass incarceration. That's a change worth fighting for.