>>I personally believe that all people who support the death penalty have no regard for
the sanctity of the innocent individual. There ARE innocents on death row -- over 10
were proven innocent in just the last few years, at least one after two stays of
execution. It has been proven that innocents were gassed, electrocuted, hung or shot
in the past.<<
The most significant study conducted to evaluate the evidence of the "innocent executed" is the
Bedau-Radelet Study ("Miscarriages of Justice in Potentially Capital Cases," 40, 1 Stanford Law
Review, 11/87). The study concluded that 23 innocent persons had been executed since 1900.
However, the study's methodology was so flawed that at least 12 of those cases had no evidence of
innocence and substantial evidence of guilt. Bedau & Radelet, both opponents, "consistently presented
incomplete and misleading accounts of the evidence." (Markman, Stephen J. & Cassell, Paul G.,
"Protecting the Innocent: A Response to the Bedau-Radelet Study" 41, 1 Stanford Law Review,
11/88). The remaining 11 cases represent 0.14% of the 7,800 executions which have taken place since
1900. And, there is, in fact, no proof that those 11 executed were innocent. In addition, the "innocents
executed" group was extracted from a Bedau & Radelet imagined pool of 350 persons who were,
supposedly, wrongly convicted of capital or "potentially" capital crimes. Not only were they at least
50% in error with their 23 "innocents executed" claim, but 211 of those 350 cases, or 60%, were not
sentenced to death. Bedau and Radelet already knew that plea bargains, the juries, the evidence, the
prosecutors, judicial review and/or the legal statutes had put these crimes in the "no capital punishment"
category. Indeed, their claims of innocence, regarding the remaining 139 of those 350 cases, should be
suspect, given this study's poor level of accuracy. Calling their work misleading hardly does this
"academic" study justice. Had a high school student presented such a report, where 50-60% of the
material was either false or misleading, a grade of F would be a likely result.
Indeed, Michigan Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Markman finds that " . . . the Bedau-Radelet study
is remarkable not (as retired Supreme Court Judge Harry Blackmun seems to believe) for
demonstrating that mistakes involving the death penalty are common, but rather for demonstrating how
uncommon they are . . . This study - the most thorough and painstaking analysis ever on the subject -
fails to prove that a single such mistake has occurred in the United States during the twentieth
century." Presumably, Bedau and Radelet would have selected the most compelling 23 cases of the
innocent executed to prove their proposition. "Yet, in each of these cases, where there is a record to
review, there are eyewitnesses, confessions, physical evidence and circumstantial evidence in support
of the defendant's guilt. Bedau has written elsewhere that it is 'false sentimentality to argue that the
death penalty ought to be abolished because of the abstract possibility that an innocent person might be
executed when the record fails to disclose that such cases exist.' . . . (T)he Bedau and Radelet study .
. . speaks eloquently about the extraordinary rarity of error in capital punishment."("Innocents on Death
Row?", National Review, September 12, 1994).
Another significant oversight by that study was not differentiating between the risk of executing
innocent persons before and after Furman v Georgia (1972). There is, in fact, no proof that an innocent
has been executed since 1900. And the probability of such a tragedy occurring has been lowered
significantly more since Furman. In the context that hundreds of thousands of innocents have been
murdered or seriously injured, since 1900, by criminals improperly released by the U.S. criminal justice
system (or not incarcerated at all!), the relevant question is: Is the risk of executing the innocent,
however slight, worth the justifications for the death penalty - those being retribution, rehabilitation,
incapacitation, required punishment, deterrence, escalating punishments, religious mandates, cost
savings, the moral imperative, just punishment and the saving of innocent lives?
Predictably, opponents still continue to fraudulently claim, even today*, that this study has proven that
23 "innocent" people have been executed, even though Bedau and Radelet, the authors of that study,
conceded - in 1988 - that neither they nor any previous researchers have proved that any of those
executed was innocent: "We agree with our critics that we have not proved these executed defendants
to be innocent; we never claimed that we had." (41, 1 Stanford Law Review, 11/1988). |
