In response to an amend­ment to the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act that would add the death penal­ty as a pun­ish­ment for cer­tain offens­es under the Act, Senator Edward Kennedy (MA) entered a state­ment into the Congressional Record high­light­ing some of the risks of the death penal­ty. An excerpt of his state­ment appears below:

Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, Senator SESSIONS has intro­duced an amend­ment that would cre­ate two new death penal­ty eli­gi­ble offens­es for crimes under the Matthew Shepard Act. I stand firm­ly in oppo­si­tion to any new leg­is­la­tion that would rad­i­cal­ly expand the use of the death penal­ty, and I urge my col­leagues in the Senate to oppose the Sessions amend­ment because it adds anoth­er new death penal­ty to the Federal Criminal Code. Since the rein­state­ment of the death penal­ty in the 1970s, the Death Penalty Information Center has report­ed that 135 peo­ple have been released from death row in the United States because of inno­cence — approx­i­mate­ly one exon­er­a­tion for every nine executions.

Some have attempt­ed to argue that the
large num­ber of death row exon­er­a­tions
demon­strates that the sys­tem is
work­ing. Yet in many cas­es, fatal mis­takes
were avoid­ed only because of dis­cov­er­ies
made by stu­dents or jour­nal­ists,
not the courts.
In the last 6 months, there have already
been five exon­er­a­tions in death
penal­ty cas­es in four dif­fer­ent States.
Ronald Kitchen was freed from prison
in Illinois after the State dis­missed all
charges against him on July 7. He had
spent 13 years on death row and a total
of 21 years in prison. Herman Lindsey
was freed from Florida’s death row on
July 9 after the State supreme court
unan­i­mous­ly ruled for his acquit­tal
from a 2006 con­vic­tion. As the court
said:
[T]he State failed to pro­duce any evi­dence
in this case plac­ing Lindsey at the scene of
the crime at the time of the mur­der.… Indeed,
we find that the evi­dence here is equal­ly
con­sis­tent with a rea­son­able hypoth­e­sis of
inno­cence.
There have also been three oth­er exon­er­a­tions
of death row pris­on­ers, includ­ing
Nathson Fields in Illinois, Paul
House in Tennessee, and Daniel Moore
in Alabama.
This high num­ber of exon­er­a­tions has
led many observers, both lib­er­al and
con­ser­v­a­tive, to express concern about

the fair­ness of the death penalty’s admin­is­tra­tion.
As for­mer Supreme Court
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor has stat­ed
‘‘if sta­tis­tics are any indi­ca­tion, the
sys­tem may well be allow­ing some inno­cent
defen­dants to be exe­cut­ed.’’
How can we con­tin­ue to expand a sys­tem
that like­ly leads to the exe­cu­tion
of inno­cent defen­dants?
The U.S. Government should not be
in the busi­ness of tak­ing the lives of
inno­cent Americans. Supreme Court
Justice Arthur Goldberg once said that
the delib­er­ate insti­tu­tion­al­ized tak­ing
of human life by the state is the great­est
degra­da­tion of the human per­son­al­i­ty
imag­in­able. We must not expand
this flawed sys­tem by accept­ing Senator
SESSIONS’ broad amendment.

(Congressional Record, Senate, at S7683-84, July 20, 2009) (state­ment of Senator Kennedy). See Innocence and Recent Legislation.

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