---
title: 'Senator Kennedy Raises Concerns About Expansion of Federal Death Penalty'
description: '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…'
canonical: 'https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/senator-kennedy-raises-concerns-about-expansion-of-federal-death-penalty'
section: news
date: '2009-07-23T16:32:27-04:00'
updated: '2025-03-14T14:26:47-04:00'
source: 'Death Penalty Information Center'
---

! 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**](/innocence-and-death-penalty?did=412&scid=6) and [**Recent Legislation**](/recent-legislative-activity?did=236&scid=40).