Innocence

Overview

Given the fal­li­bil­i­ty of human judg­ment, there has always been the dan­ger that an exe­cu­tion could result in the killing of an inno­cent per­son. Nevertheless, when the U.S. Supreme Court held the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty to be uncon­sti­tu­tion­al in 1972, there was bare­ly any men­tion of the issue of inno­cence in the nine opin­ions issued. Although mis­takes were sure­ly made in the past, the assump­tion pre­vailed that such cas­es were few and far between. Almost every­one on death row was surely guilty.

However, as fed­er­al courts began to more thor­ough­ly review whether state crim­i­nal defen­dants were afford­ed their guar­an­teed rights to due process, errors and offi­cial mis­con­duct began to reg­u­lar­ly appear, requir­ing retri­als. When defen­dants were now afford­ed more expe­ri­enced coun­sel, with fair­ly select­ed juries, and were grant­ed access to sci­en­tif­ic test­ing, some were acquit­ted and released. Since 1973, 200 for­mer death-row pris­on­ers have been exon­er­at­ed of all charges relat­ed to the wrong­ful con­vic­tions that had put them on death row.
 

At Issue

It is now clear that inno­cent defen­dants will be con­vict­ed and sen­tenced to death with some reg­u­lar­i­ty as long as the death penal­ty exists. It is unlike­ly that the appeals process — which is main­ly focused on legal errors and not on fac­tu­al deter­mi­na­tions — will catch all the mis­takes. Reforms have been begrudg­ing­ly imple­ment­ed, increas­ing both the costs and the time that the death penal­ty con­sumes, but have not been suf­fi­cient to over­come human error. The pop­u­lar­i­ty and use of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment have rapid­ly declined as the inno­cence issue has gained atten­tion. The remain­ing ques­tion is how many inno­cent lives are worth sac­ri­fic­ing to pre­serve this punishment.

What DPIC Offers

DPI has led the way in high­light­ing the issue of inno­cence. Its list of exon­er­at­ed indi­vid­u­als is pre­sent­ed in a search­able data­base, with links to more com­plete descrip­tions of each case. DPI has issued a series of reports on this issue, col­lect­ing the lat­est infor­ma­tion on why so many mis­takes occur. It also fol­lows the relat­ed ques­tions of whether inno­cent indi­vid­u­als have already been exe­cut­ed and whether some defen­dants are in fact inno­cent, despite not being com­plete­ly exon­er­at­ed in the eyes of the law.