EDITORIAL: ​“Should the issue of life or death be trusted to a system that can get guilt or innocence wrong?”

After mem­bers of the Wisconsin Senate passed a res­o­lu­tion call­ing for a ref­er­en­dum on rein­stat­ing the death penalt, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel edi­to­r­i­al crit­i­cized the vote and urged mem­bers of the state Assembly to reject the pro­pos­al. ThoughWisconsin has not had the death penal­ty since 1853, the state leg­is­la­ture has con­sid­ered a rein­state­ment mea­sure dur­ing each of the past 20 years. The Sentinel voiced con­cerns about inno­cence, race, deter­rence, and a vari­ety of oth­er issues in its editorial:

The death penal­ty is moral­ly wrong. Lawmakers should sim­ply do the right thing and retain the ban. An irony is that this effort to restore the death penal­ty in Wisconsin comes when the nation has devel­oped qualms about the pun­ish­ment — as reflect­ed in a slowed pace of executions.

The dis­cov­ery of inno­cent peo­ple on death row has led to the doubts. This devel­op­ment points to the fal­li­bil­i­ty of our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Should the issue of life or death be trust­ed to a sys­tem that can get guilt or inno­cence wrong? That ques­tion, which has prompt­ed much pause else­where, should do like­wise in Madison.

Yes, the res­o­lu­tion would lim­it the penal­ty to homi­cides sup­port­ed by DNA evi­dence. But sure­ly, its back­ers aren’t sug­gest­ing that check would make the penal­ty infal­li­ble, are they? After all, con­clu­sions from legit­i­mate DNA evi­dence may be erroneous.

There are oth­er prob­lems: It is almost inescapably applied in a racial­ly dis­crim­i­na­to­ry man­ner. It serves no crime-fight­ing pur­pose. And main­tain­ing a death row costs a fortune.

A small skir­mish has bro­ken out over stud­ies. But of hun­dreds of com­par­a­tive stud­ies — that is, stud­ies that com­pare states with the death penal­ty and states with­out it or coun­tries before and after drop­ping the penal­ty — none shows that the death penal­ty has deterred a sin­gle mur­der, as notes soci­ol­o­gist Ted Goertzel of Rutgers University.

Backers of the death penal­ty cite math­e­mat­i­cal stud­ies using what the experts call ​“econo­met­ric mod­el­ing.” Yes, some such stud­ies do show a deter­rent effect. Others, how­ev­er, show just the oppo­site: Executions actu­al­ly encour­age mur­ders. Right now, those stud­ies, what­ev­er their out­come, sim­ply can’t be trust­ed. They lack assur­ance that the math­e­mat­i­cal mod­els duplicate reality.

Yes, in the face of a heinous crime, the impulse is for revenge. But a civ­i­lized soci­ety must con­trol that impulse — a les­son the Wisconsin Legislature learned more than 150 years ago. Now, the Assembly must heed that lesson anew.

(Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, March 13, 2006). See Recent Legislative Activity and Editorials.