In the Shadow of Death — Letters from a friend on death row shed light on the ultimate legal penalty
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The most dramatic statement yet made about the inherent injustice of the death penalty as it is now applied was made in 2000, in Illinois. That's when the state's governor, George Ryan, a pro-death-penalty Republican, granted clemency to every inmate on Illinois' death row. He did so because, he said, he had become convinced that it was highly likely, even probable, that some of the prisoners were innocent and he was unwilling to allow an innocent person to be put to death.
Ryan's change of heart on the death penalty had come about as the result of work by the Center on Wrongful Convictions, a group of professors and students at Northwestern University's School of Law, in Chicago. The group formed in November 1998, just a week after Shapiro's article appeared, when the law school hosted a national conference on wrongful convictions and the death penalty. There, 28 men whose convictions for murder had been overturned appeared on stage to tell their stories. The event garnered national media attention.
By 2000, the center had revealed so many flaws in Illinois' capital-punishment process that Ryan decided to make his historic move.
The Center on Wrongful Convictions is one of several groups affiliated with the national Innocence Project, which is working to find innocent prisoners throughout the country. The project's most powerful tool is DNA analysis, which it has used on many occasions to prove that prisoners did not commit the crimes of which they were convicted. This effort, more than any other, has cast doubt on the reliability of the death penalty process.
Bad lawyering is not the only cause of wrongful convictions. As Shapiro's U.S. News article notes, one-third of wrongful convictions are a result of perjured testimony--"often from jailhouse snitches claiming to have heard a defendant's prison confession."
Just this year, in February, a Superior Court judge in Ventura County, Charles McGrath, petitioned Governor Schwarzenegger to commute--to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole--the death sentence he himself had given a death row inmate named Michael Morales. McGrath had been made newly aware that testimony presented at trial by a jailhouse informant who claimed to have heard Morales bragging of his murder of Terri Winchell in 1981 was false. Schwarzenegger refused to honor McGrath's request.
Even former "mad-dog" prosecutor Donald Heller, the author of California's 1977 death penalty law, began to have his doubts about it after a few years as a defense lawyer. As reported in the Sacramento News & Review, Heller recently said: "First of all, it discriminates against the poor.... If you can hire a dream team, your chances improve. You don't see too many rich people on death row."
Death Penalty Focus, an organization dedicated to the abolition of capital punishment, asserts that numerous aspects of capital cases involve a heightened risk of error that can lead to wrongful convictions. For instance, the death penalty has become a politicized issue that is commonly used in campaigns for elected judgeships and district attorney positions. Such political pressure can motivate judges and prosecutors to seek to sentence defendants to death in order to appear "tough on crime."
Similar public pressure on law enforcement officials to resolve homicides quickly--especially in highly emotional cases--increases the likelihood of misconduct by investigators and prosecutors. The frequent lack of eyewitnesses in murder cases can force prosecutors to use less reliable sources for evidence, such as jailhouse snitches, accomplices looking for reduced sentences, and coerced confessions from defendants. And, because of scarce resources, defense lawyers must often decide whether it's better to focus on the initial defense or spend more time and energy preparing for the sentencing phase. Lack of money to pay for investigations also contributes to weak defenses.