Policy Issues
Innocence
The death penalty carries the inherent risk of executing an innocent person. Since 1973, more than 170 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated.
Policy Issues
The death penalty carries the inherent risk of executing an innocent person. Since 1973, more than 170 people who had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in the U.S. have been exonerated.
A Death Penalty Information Center database of every death-row exoneration since 1972.
The Most Common Causes of Wrongful Death Penalty Convictions: Official Misconduct and Perjury or False Accusation
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, 173 former death-row prisoners have been exonerated of all charges related to the wrongful convictions that had put them on death row.
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.
DPIC 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. DPIC 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.
Oct 23, 2020
Prosecutors or police used or threatened to use the death penalty as a coercive tool that led to or extended the wrongful convictions of at least nineteen people who were exonerated in 2019, a Death Penalty Information Center analysis of data from…
Read MoreJan 12, 2021
Eddie Lee Howard, Jr., convicted and sentenced to death based on the false forensic testimony of a since disgraced prosecution expert witness, has been exonerated after nearly 26 years on Mississippi’s death row. …
Jan 07, 2021
Calling the death penalty “ineffective, racially based, hypocritical and inhumane,” St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell (pictured) has renewed his pledge to never authorize a capital prosecution. In a December 23, 20…
Jan 06, 2021
Witness to Innocence, the national organization of U.S. death-row exonerees, has released a series of short videos under the tag “#ImLivingProof,” featuring the stories of men and women who had been wrongfully convicted and senten…
Dec 22, 2020
The Texas Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the state’s comptroller had no authority to deny death-row exoneree Alfred Dewayne Brown’s application for compensation after a trial court had declared him “actu…
Dec 21, 2020
NEWS (12/18/20) — Texas: The Texas Supreme Court has overturned a ruling by the state’s comptroller that had denied death-row exoneree Alfred Dew…
Dec 17, 2020
A former Pennsylvania death-row prisoner has been freed, one month after the trial court barred his retrial because of “egregious” prosecutorial misconduct by the county district attorney. On December 1, 2020, Berks County…
Nov 09, 2020
Citing the coronavirus pandemic, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has granted a temporary reprieve to death-row prisoner Pervis Payne, halting his scheduled December 3, 2020 execution. The execution was the last schedu…
Nov 06, 2020
The Death Penalty Information Center is partnering with the Veteran Advocacy Project to present a six-part webinar series on Veterans and the Death Penalty. The webinars, which are co-sponsored by Advancing Real Change, Inc. and Witness to Innocen…
Nov 03, 2020
A three-judge panel in Madison County, Ohio has acquitted a man prosecutors charged with capital murder for allegedly setting his car on fire to burn down his house with his wife and children inside. The judges rejected p…
Oct 22, 2020
Expressing the hope “that we’ll be able to celebrate very soon, together with the American people, the abolition of the death penalty in the United States,” European Union Ambassador to the United States Stavros Lambrinidi…