Op-Ed: 1,000 Executions – A Death Penalty Milestone

The United States will soon mark an historic but lamentable milestone.

As early as Friday, when Kenneth Lee Boyd of North Carolina and Shawn Humphries of South Carolina are scheduled to be put to death, we could see the 1,000th execution in this country since reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976.  If not one of them, it appears likely another man will make history within days, as two others are scheduled for execution between now and mid-December.

Each of these cases, like those before them, presents unique questions of guilt, innocence, or the appropriateness of the sentence.   All, however,  share the distinction of coming through a system in America that imposes the death penalty without first assuring due process – a system that does not guarantee the effective assistance of a competent legal advocate; a system that does not  adequately guard against the impact of bias related to the race of the victim or the defendant, to geography or to economic status; and a system that does not ensure that a defendant’s mental health and character are properly investigated and the evidence presented to the decision maker.  In short, these individuals, like so many before them, face execution without the assurance that justice has been done.

While the American Bar Association has taken no position for or against the death penalty, it has supported a moratorium on executions since 1997 because of profound and systemic problems in the death penalty system.  The ABA has long argued for better lawyers, meaningful standards, and more caution in a system that, regrettably, has been broken for decades.  These are reforms that are long overdue.

The U.S. criminal justice system, with its constitutional guarantee of presumed innocence and protection of individual rights, often has served as a model for other nations. But the reality in death penalty cases is far from that ideal. Administration of the death penalty is neither fair nor consistent, and can fairly be described only as a haphazard maze of unfair practices, a maze that tolerates injustice in case after case.

A temporary moratorium would remove the pressure of impending executions to allow detailed analysis of death penalty administration in each jurisdiction and implementation of the reforms necessary to ensure fairness.

Protocols developed by the ABA offer death penalty jurisdictions a guide to assess their systems against accepted standards for due process and fairness.  If we truly are committed to justice for all, we should implement these standards in every jurisdiction that seeks to take life.

The Death Penalty Information Center reports that 122 persons have been released from death row since 1973 because of evidence of their innocence.  Recent media reports suggest that Texas death row prisoner Ruben Cantu was very likely innocent of the crime for which he was executed in 1993.  In Missouri, the St. Louis city prosecutor currently is conducting a posthumous investigation as to whether Larry Griffin was innocent of the crime for which he was executed in 1995.  These are the tragic consequences of a malfunctioning system.

Executing innocent people is not justice.  A legal system that takes life must first demonstrate that justice has been given.