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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