NEW VOICES: American Bar Association President Calls for Death Penalty Moratorium

William Neukom, the President of the American Bar Association, recent­ly wrote about the death penal­ty in con­junc­tion with a vis­it to Duke University Law School in North Carolina, where he addressed the grad­u­at­ing class. In an op-ed, Mr. Neukom not­ed that the ABA had close­ly stud­ied the death penal­ty sys­tems of eight states and found repeat­ed fail­ures to meet min­i­mum stan­dards advo­cat­ed by the ABA. He renewed the call of the ABA for a halt to exe­cu­tions until these prob­lems are addressed, call­ing on North Carolina leg­is­la­tors in par­tic­u­lar to pass a Racial Justice Act. An excerpt from his op-ed follows:

The American Bar Association takes no posi­tion on whether the death penal­ty is right or wrong. But the asso­ci­a­tion strong­ly main­tains that no per­son should be exe­cut­ed unless that per­son has a lawyer and received a fair tri­al. Yet when teams of experts from eight states’ own legal com­mu­ni­ties applied ABA pro­to­cols to exam­ine their death penal­ty sys­tems, they doc­u­ment­ed evi­dence of racial dis­par­i­ties, poor­ly trained or inad­e­quate lawyers, insuf­fi­cient defense resources, con­fused jurors, fail­ure to pre­serve sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence for fol­low-up analy­sis and a host of oth­er prob­lems.

This is why the ABA renewed its call last year for a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions in each death penal­ty juris­dic­tion, until thor­ough analy­sis can uncov­er each and every short­com­ing, and the states can rec­ti­fy the prob­lems.

The death penal­ty analy­ses that have been done in select states demon­strate that the promise of due process often remains unful­filled. Racially dis­parate treat­ment of peo­ple in our crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, from arrest to charg­ing to seek­ing the death penal­ty, has been and remains a fun­da­men­tal issue that we must address.

The Racial Justice Act, pend­ing in the North Carolina General Assembly, is an effort to do so, by allow­ing courts of appeals to con­sid­er whether or not racism was a con­sid­er­a­tion in impos­ing a death sen­tence. Legislators should con­sid­er whether this mea­sure will advance jus­tice in capital cases. 

(William Neukom, ​“ABA: Stop Executions Until …,” Charlotte Observer, May 11, 2008). See New Voices.