This summer, I’m going to be sending a series of monthly educational newsletters highlighting all of the different components of, and flaws with, the death penalty. This month I’d like to touch on the issue of innocence and the death penalty. As long as the death penalty exists, there will always be the risk of executing an innocent person. This is a big reason why I am against the death penalty.
Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1973, 185 former death-row prisoners have been exonerated of all charges related to the wrongful convictions that had put them on death row. That equates to one exoneration for every eight executions in this country, which should be alarming to everyone, regardless of political affiliation.
Wrongful convictions rob innocent individuals of their freedom, waste tax dollars, and re-traumatize victims’ family. Hundreds of DNA exonerations reveal that murder cases often come with many problems: mistaken eyewitnesses, inadequate lawyers, shoddy forensics, unreliable jailhouse informants, and coerced false confessions. What’s more, DNA evidence exists in only 10% or less of criminal cases. Human beings are not perfect and our criminal justice system is especially not perfect so mistakes are going to be made.
A special report by the Death Penalty Information Center indicates that “an analysis of death-row exonerations shows that innocent people are sentenced to death in most states and in every region of the country that authorizes capital punishment. They can be sentenced to death anywhere, but are most often wrongfully condemned in states and counties with a history of aggressive pursuit of the death penalty or that authorize outlier practices that make it easier to impose capital sanctions.”
Based on this information the question we should all be asking ourselves is, “How many innocent lives are worth sacrificing to preserve this profoundly flawed punishment?” One life is one too many in terms of the possibility of executing an innocent person, and the only way to prevent this is to repeal the death penalty.
Ray Krone was the 100th person in the United States to be exonerated from death row. Ray testified to the Wyoming Senate Revenue Committee in support of Senate File 150.
The risk of executing an innocent person is just one of many reasons it’s time to repeal Wyoming’s death penalty. Keep an eye out for next months newsletter for a breakdown of the cost of the death penalty.