One week ago, I supported the death penalty. Today, I do not,
and I’d like to tell you why.
Most days I study for class with the television on, usually
tuned to CNN or Fox News, and rarely does a news story truly pique
my interest. But last Saturday, a story from America’s
heartland caught my attention, and I’ve been following it
closely ever since. On that day, Gov. George Ryan of Illinois, a
conservative Republican, granted clemency to 167 men and women
condemned to die, effectively clearing the state’s death
row.
During a speech at Northwestern University Law School, he gave
the justification for his decision by announcing, “Our
capital (punishment) system is haunted by the demon of error: error
in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty
deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was
poverty having? Because of all these reasons, today I am in favor
of commuting the sentences of all death row inmates.”
I watched prisoners being led out of their cells and into the
arms of loved ones. I watched parents praise God over the sparing
of their children, and I was stunned and a little upset by it. For
the next few days I turned these events over and over in my
mind. All I could think of was the 167 juries whose rulings
were overturned and of a governor who had betrayed his
constituents. I agreed with Cook County State Attorney Richard
Devine, whose office had prosecuted many of these violent
criminals, when he said, “(Ryan) has breached faith with the
memory of the dead victims, their families, and the people he was
elected to serve.”
I decided to write a column all about Ryan, ripping into him
from every angle ““ I’d call him a vigilante (which he
was), or a crooked politician (which he is), or say that this was
no more than an effort to rebuild a crumbling legacy (which it
might have been). And then I started to dig into the story, but
guess what I found?
Ryan was right.
I realized that Ryan didn’t grant clemency to those people
because they were good guys. He granted clemency because death
penalty convictions have an alarmingly high rate of condemning the
innocent. In fact, according to the Death Penalty Information
Center in Washington DC, since 1976 (when the death penalty was
reinstated nationwide) one out of every eight men sentenced to die
were later exonerated ““ some posthumously. That’s a
12.5 percent failure rate, and that’s shameful. An airline
with a 12.5 percent crash rate would be shut down in a day. A
doctor with a 12.5 percent mortality rate during surgery would
quickly be demolished by malpractice suits. Yet death
sentences in the United States are decreed every day.
It is also shocking to see how arbitrarily the death penalty is
handed out. If you’re from a poor, small town, then you
better watch out. A person found guilty of murder in a rural
community (particularly in Illinois, but similar statistics are
found nationwide) is five times more likely to receive the death
penalty than someone from the big city. If you happen to be black
or latino, then be careful. You are much more likely to receive the
death penalty if convicted of murder than your white neighbor. Now,
I’m not one to carelessly play the race card or to habitually
claim social injustice, but these numbers don’t lie. The
death penalty is far too arbitrary to be just.
The death penalty, under its current incarnation, is inaccurate
and unfair. I strongly agree with Richard Dieter, the director of
the aforementioned Death Penalty Information Center, when he
stated, “We need a higher standard of due process before we
sentence people to die”. Our technology, our witness’
testimony, and our court’s rulings are not always perfect.
For something as irreversible as death, the standard should be
nothing less than perfection.
Gov. Ryan said he did this so he could sleep better at night,
knowing that innocent men wouldn’t be executed. For his
brave act, Gov. Ryan deserves to sleep better at night. But we
still have a long way to go before those innocent men, waiting on
death row in prisons around the country, can get a good
night’s sleep as well.
Ludlow is a second-year political science student. E-mail him
your comments at dludlow@media.ucla.edu.