Law Review: Article Tracks 400 Years of America’s ​“Inglorious Experience” With the Death Penalty

A landmark article in the Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy provides a “compilation of milestones in the American experience with capital punishment,” tracking more than 400 years of the “inglorious experience with capital punishment” in what is now the United States. Authors Rob Warden (pictured, left), Executive Director Emeritus at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic Center on Wrongful Convictions, and Daniel Lennard (pictured, right), a lawyer at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, tracked more than four centuries of capital punishment on what is now American soil.

“As our milestones show,” they write, “capital punishment … has been plagued by racism, infliction of pain both intentional and unintentional, executions for crimes to which the death penalty no longer applies, for the imaginary crime of witchcraft, and, in two instances, murders that appear not to have occurred.”

The authors present more than 300 chronological vignettes that depict endemic injustice in a death-penalty system they say has “claimed lives of the mentally ill, the severely intellectually handicapped or brain-damaged, juveniles, and thousands of prisoners executed in U.S. jurisdictions that have since abolished or suspended capital punishment.”

Underscoring the dangers of capital punishment, the authors explain that “for every ten death row prisoners executed” under laws enacted after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the nation’s capital punishment schemes in 1972 “more than one has been exonerated.” Moreover, death-row prisoners “in effect committ[ed] state-abetted suicide” in nearly ten percent of the executions during this period, undermining appellate safeguards by voluntarily abandoning discretionary appeals.

Although three states have acknowledged having executed innocent defendants, Warden and Lennard present evidence that “untold numbers of others who likely were innocent” also have been executed. The authors ultimately conclude that maintaining capital punishment in the U.S. makes little sense “in light of its lack of a deterrent effect on crime, its racially discriminatory imposition, the risk of executing the innocent, and its obscenely high cost.” They say that while recent judicial appointments may have delayed death-penalty abolition, the trends against capital punishment “bode well” and “the outlook for abolition of the death penalty in the United States remains positive—even if it is likelier to come later than sooner.”