A recent Dallas Morning News edi­to­r­i­al decried the use of expert wit­ness­es who claim to have the abil­i­ty to pre­dict future dan­ger­ous­ness, a deter­mi­na­tion that jurors in Texas heav­i­ly rely on in sen­tenc­ing peo­ple to death. The edi­to­r­i­al states:

In Texas, we exe­cute crim­i­nals not for what they did, but for what they might do.

Convicted mur­der­er David Harris has a date with the exe­cu­tion­er June 30 for hav­ing killed a man in a Beaumont gun­fight. But that’s not enough to get Mr. Harris, or any Texas mur­der­er, a death sen­tence.

Here, a con­vict­ed mur­der­er can only draw the death penal­ty if, accord­ing to state law, a jury is unan­i­mous­ly con­vinced that ​“there is a prob­a­bil­i­ty that the defen­dant would com­mit crim­i­nal acts of vio­lence that would con­sti­tute a con­tin­u­ing threat to soci­ety.“

This news­pa­per has sup­port­ed the death penal­ty, but this statute is wrong and should not stand.

How can a jury know what vio­lent crimes any­body might com­mit? They could con­sult with the Psychic Friends Network. Or they could do some­thing that the American Psychiatric Association con­sid­ers about as reli­able: ask a psy­chi­a­trist to give his expert opin­ion. According to The New York Times, Dr. Edward Gripon, the psy­chi­a­trist and expert wit­ness who helped con­vince a jury of David Harris’ future dan­ger­ous­ness, nev­er met the defen­dant and based his expert tes­ti­mo­ny on the pros­e­cu­tion’s descrip­tion of the man’s con­duct.

Dr. Gripon guessed wrong. The most vio­lent thing Mr. Harris has done since his 1986 con­vic­tion was kick a guard’s boot. Because of a lazy psy­chi­a­trist’s bad judg­ment, a man who ought to be spend­ing life in prison will die.

It’s appro­pri­ate to con­sid­er pos­si­ble future acts in parole hear­ings or when deter­min­ing sen­tence length. But such spec­u­la­tion should nev­er be the deter­min­ing fac­tor in whether the state takes a per­son­’s life. Pseudo-sci­en­tif­ic guess­work has no place in mat­ters of life and death.

(Dallas Morning News, June 16, 2004) (empha­sis added). See Editorials.

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