Death penalty fails as effective public policy

By Matthew Robinson

Tallahassee Democrat, January 2007

In his final weeks as governor, Jeb Bush did the right thing by halting all executions in Florida after a botched lethal injection. The mistake would be for the state to ever again resume capital punishment.

While there are logical arguments in favor of the death penalty in theory, capital punishment does not exist in theory. The reality of the death penalty, as it is practiced in the real world, makes it a nonsustainable criminal-justice policy.

I've just completed a study of scholarly experts on capital punishment - people who have taught and conducted research about the death penalty for their entire careers - and they overwhelmingly oppose capital punishment, call for its abolition and favor alternatives including life imprisonment without parole.

The experts offer three main reasons for their opposition.

First, the death penalty fails to achieve its goals of retribution, deterrence and incapacitation. Because killings so rarely lead to an execution in the United States, capital punishment does not achieve justice for society or for relatives of murder victims, does not scare would-be murderers, and does not kill enough murderers to have any impact on the murder rate.

In the United States between 1977 and 2005, there were 575,437 murders and non-negligent homicides. These led to only 6,934 death sentences and 1,004 executions. Thus, only 1.2 percent of killings from 1977 to 2005 led to death sentences, and only 0.17 percent of killings have led to an execution so far. Even Texas, which leads the nation in the number of executions since 1977, executes fewer than 1 percent of its murderers per year.

The rarity of the death penalty is precisely why it is so ineffective and inefficient.

Second, the application of the death penalty in the United States is plagued by significant biases based on race, social class and gender. Killers of whites are far more likely to be executed than killers of blacks - regardless of the race of the killer, but especially when the killer is black and the victim is white.

Further, virtually every person on death row is poor, consistent with the evidence that what determines who gets executed is not the heinousness of the crime but the quality of the defense. And citizens in every state with capital punishment are remarkably squeamish about executing women.

Third, there is a serious risk that capital punishment will be used against the factually innocent. Not only do we know that 113 people have been released from death row since 1977 (Florida leads with 19 exonerations since 1977), but there is also no doubt that states have recently executed innocent people. Clear cases of innocence have emerged in Texas, Missouri and Florida.

Judged by any standard, the death penalty is a failed policy. It fails to meet its goals, and the costs clearly outweigh the modest benefits.

Supporters may react with a call for more executions, which logically would make capital punishment more effective at achieving retribution, deterrence and incapacitation. But the reality is that prosecutors are not willing to seek the punishment, juries are not willing to impose it, and counties and states are unwilling to pay the enormous costs to carry out the death penalty with any greater frequency.

The only right thing to do is to end executions once and for all. Twelve states and the District of Colombia already live without the death penalty; a large majority of death-penalty states do not regularly carry out executions; and the United States is the only Western industrialized country to still use capital punishment. This suggests that the death penalty is something Americans could easily do without.

Newly elected Gov. Charlie Christ, and all governors of death-penalty states, should call for the abolition of capital punishment. It is a criminal-justice policy that is ineffective, inefficient, plagued by serious problems, and unfixable.