The Chair of the Judiciary Committee of the New York Assembly recent­ly voiced her strong con­cerns about the state’s death penal­ty. Although she sup­port­ed cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment ear­li­er, Assemblywoman Helene E. Weinstein spoke about the evo­lu­tion in her think­ing and her par­tic­u­lar con­cerns about the risk of exe­cut­ing the inno­cent: ​“It was an evo­lu­tion­ary process. But clear­ly the advent of DNA evi­dence and the dra­mat­ic num­ber of indi­vid­u­als who have been exon­er­at­ed and freed from death row in states around the coun­try was some­thing that was build­ing in my mind.… I’m not sure there’s any­thing as dra­mat­ic or as impor­tant as the death penal­ty in terms of my vote. I have cer­tain­ly looked at leg­isla­tive pro­pos­als I sup­port­ed or opposed and become con­vinced there’s room for a change of posi­tion. Times and evi­dence have changed. That is the won­der­ful thing about a mind: You can change when you hear evi­dence and make an intel­li­gent choice,” said Weinstein.

Weinstein not­ed that the costs asso­ci­at­ed with cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment have meant that about $170 mil­lion has already been spent on a death penal­ty that has not result­ed in one exe­cu­tion. These funds, she explained, could have been used to sup­port oth­er crim­i­nal jus­tice or social pro­grams. She also found the pos­si­bil­i­ty of an unequal jus­tice sys­tem that is taint­ed by racism to be ​“very dis­turb­ing,” and she became con­vinced that the death penal­ty does not deter vio­lent crime. ​“I believed when I vot­ed for it that there was a deter­rent effect. I am pret­ty con­vinced now that there isn’t. No one ever thinks he’s get­ting caught, and the like­li­hood that you’re going to get caught, con­vict­ed and receive the death penal­ty is so remote,” she explained.

Weinstein and oth­er New York Assembly mem­bers recent­ly held a series of hear­ings on the state’s death penal­ty law. She will now be instru­men­tal in deter­min­ing the future course of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in the state. ​“I think it was impos­si­ble for any­one to sit through the tes­ti­mo­ny and not come away with the con­clu­sion that you can­not draft a death penal­ty law that does not have the pos­si­bil­i­ty of con­vict­ing some­one who is inno­cent. It seems clear to me that from all of what we’ve heard the chance of con­vict­ing an inno­cent indi­vid­ual remains a pos­si­bil­i­ty, and there’s no way to rec­ti­fy that. People are see­ing that the jus­tice sys­tem is not infal­li­ble,” she observed (New York Times, February 28, 2005) (empha­sis added). See New Voices. See also, Innocence, Costs, Deterrence, and Race.

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