Attorneys from the New York Capital Defender Office have fol­lowed the lead of var­i­ous death penal­ty experts and peti­tioned the New York Court of Appeals to require a high­er stan­dard of proof of guilt before a death sen­tence may be sought. The cur­rent stan­dard of ​“beyond a rea­son­able doubt” of guilt applies in both cap­i­tal and non-cap­i­tal cas­es. Because of the evi­dence of mis­takes in death penal­ty cas­es, the attor­neys called for proof ​“beyond any doubt” in such cas­es. Frank Keating, a senior Justice Department offi­cial in the Reagan admin­is­tra­tion who tried to raise the lev­el of cer­tain­ty to secure a cap­i­tal con­vic­tion dur­ing his recent tenure as Governor of Oklahoma, not­ed, ​“I am cer­tain­ly no shrink­ing civ­il lib­er­tar­i­an, but I think if you’re going to take some­body else’s life, you need to be con­vinced to a moral cer­tain­ty.” Professor James Liebman of Columbia Law School, who has exten­sive­ly stud­ied the error rate in cap­i­tal cas­es, stat­ed that the move­ment toward a high­er stan­dard of proof is a log­i­cal out­growth of the effort to make the death penal­ty more reli­able. (New York Times, January 11, 2004) See Innocence.

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