A&E tele­vi­sion host and well-known inves­tiga­tive jour­nal­ist Bill Kurtis chron­i­cles his jour­ney from death penal­ty sup­port­er to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment oppo­nent in his new­ly released book, The Death Penalty on Trial: Crisis in American Justice. In an inter­view with the Kansas City Star, Kurtis stat­ed, ​“Look, I was for the death penal­ty, but look­ing at these cas­es and the rapid­ly increas­ing num­ber of exon­er­a­tions, there are just too many pos­si­bil­i­ties for error.” He went on to observe, ​“You have a sys­tem with too many work­ing parts. We have mal­prac­tice in med­i­cine. We don’t expect the Yankees to win all their games. And yet we assume the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem is with­out error.” Kurtis’s new book exam­ines two cas­es of death row exonerees, detail­ing the errors that led to their wrong­ful con­vic­tions. Through his inves­ti­ga­tion, Kurtis came to the real­iza­tion that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment must end because the sys­tem can­not guar­an­tee accu­ra­cy.

In his call for aban­don­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, he states, ​“We have two lit­tle final obsta­cles to get over. One is that we have to con­vince peo­ple that life with­out parole is bad. Worse than killing some­body. And sec­ond­ly, we have to get over the fact that it’s some kind of clo­sure for the fam­i­lies. The only rea­son the death penal­ty is still there is that we want to do some­thing for the vic­tims. It’s ​‘clo­sure.’ But what if you lose your wife from can­cer, or a car wreck? Someone killed in Iraq – what do you do then? It’s not clo­sure. It nev­er is.” (Kansas City Star, December 16, 2004). See New Voices. See also Innocence, Life Without Parole, and Victims.

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