DPIC In-Depth Reports

The dan­ger that inno­cent peo­ple will be exe­cut­ed because of errors in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem is get­ting worse. A total of 69 peo­ple have been released from death row since 1973 after evi­dence of their inno­cence emerged. Twenty-one con­demned inmates have been released since 1993, includ­ing sev­en from the state of Illinois alone. Many of these cas­es were dis­cov­ered not because of the nor­mal appeals process, but rather as a result of new sci­en­tif­ic tech­niques, inves­ti­ga­tions by jour­nal­ists, and the ded­i­cat­ed work of expert attor­neys, not avail­able to the…

The infu­sion of the death penal­ty into polit­i­cal races is reach­ing new extremes and dis­tort­ing the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. Although the use of death sen­tences to gain polit­i­cal lever­age is cer­tain­ly not new, the dem­a­goguery aimed at esca­lat­ing exe­cu­tions has become more per­va­sive. Not only are can­di­dates for leg­isla­tive office cam­paign­ing loud­ly on the death penal­ty, even judges and local pros­e­cu­tors are cit­ing the num­bers of peo­ple they have sent to death row in their cam­paigns for office. This polit­i­cal pro­mo­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment by those respon­si­ble for inter­pret­ing and…

–William J. Brennan, Jr., retired Supreme Court Justice, 1996 [1]

As exe­cu­tions reach record num­bers in the U.S., the sys­tem of rep­re­sen­ta­tion for those fac­ing the death penal­ty is in a state of cri­sis. Far from the legal ​“dream team” assem­bled in the O.J. Simpson case, cap­i­tal defen­dants are giv­en attor­neys who fail to inves­ti­gate, who fall asleep dur­ing tri­al or come into court drunk, attor­neys bare­ly out of law school, or attor­neys who say noth­ing when their clien­t’s life is on the line. Too many states encour­age this mal­prac­tice by offer­ing total­ly inad­e­quate pay and resources for death penalty…

A new nation­al sur­vey of police chiefs from around the coun­try dis­cred­its the repeat­ed asser­tion that the death penal­ty is an impor­tant law enforce­ment tool. While politi­cians have extolled the impor­tance of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in fight­ing crime, they have failed to assess the actu­al pri­or­i­ties of those in law enforce­ment and have sad­dled the tax­pay­ers with an enor­mous­ly cost­ly death penal­ty at the expense of more effec­tive crime fight­ing strategies.