The death penalty: Can it ever be foolproof ?
A current and former state governor squared off on the death penalty at the Wharton Center last week. Republican George Ryan, small-town pharmacist, longtime public servant and recently retired governor of Illinois, who was once a "firm believer in the death penalty," detailed how his encounters with America's "broken" death penalty made him change his mind. Colorado Gov. William Owens, who was born and educated in Texas, Americas leading execution state, claimed that "some crimes are so heinous and premeditated that death is the only penalty that is truly appropriate" and that it "does have a deterrent effect." His state has executed only 1person in the past 2 decades and has 3 on its death row today, he said.
"The general public has no idea of how the death penalty system works," Ryan said, describing the searing experience of 13 Illinois death row inmates who had been through the system, exhausted all their appeals, were waiting to be killed and - starting in 1987 - were all discovered to be innocent. "More of our Illinois death row inmates were exonerated than we had executed," Ryan emphasized, and he wanted to know why.
Most revealing was the case of Anthony Porter, a poor black man who was 18 years on death row and whose I.Q. was so low that "I'm not even sure he knew why he was there," Ryan said. He was just 48 hours from execution and had already been measured for his burial suit by the guards when some journalism students at Northwestern University who were working on a reporting project happened to find the real killer and even got his confession on videotape. Porter hadn't had a chance when the prosecutor and the police had needed to "solve" the crime of which he was wrongly convicted. The real killer, by the way, didn't get the death penalty. Porter's case is paralleled by more than 100 death-row exonerations in America during the last 30 years.
Ryan called a moratorium on executions and appointed a blue-ribbon commission. The Chicago press investigated. The press found 33 of almost 300 Illinois death-row cases where the person sentenced to die had an attorney who was disbarred or suspended, 46 cases where they were convicted by informants given a "get out of jail free" card to nail the defendant, and 35 cases where black defendants were convicted and sentenced to death by all-white juries. To make them "confess," Ryan noted, the police had tortured some with blowtorches, suffocation and cattle prods. All too often the wrongful convictions were caused by false evidence given to the jury.
Ryan's commission made 85 recommendations to lessen the chance of convicting the innocent, but the Illinois legislature would pass none of them. Faced with the moral certainty that at least a few of those remaining on Illinois' death row were innocent, but not knowing which ones, Ryan commuted all 167 of their sentences to life imprisonment just before he left office.
Owens for his part recited the gory details of several grisly murders, charged Ryan with abusing his power as governor by making such a blanket commutation and said that there was "not one case in 100 years in the United States of an actually innocent person being executed." Ryan responded that his state's Constitution clearly gave the governor the power to commute sentences in situations like this to prevent fatal, irreversible errors. The very idea of "knowing" that only the guilty were executed during the past 100 years was an impossibility, he suggested; and of course once there is an execution, the case is officially closed forever.
Owens spent some time pointing out the risk that a murderer sentenced to life imprisonment might kill again. He did not mention that such cases are quite rare and in a well-run prison system the risk of that happening is probably much less than the risk of convicting and executing the innocent.
On the subject of deterrence, Owens mentioned but did not describe a few studies by professional economists that he said showed that the death penalty has a deterrent effect - that is, that it deterred murder better than life without parole. He seemed unaware that the methodology and accuracy of economic studies of the subject have been sharply criticized by the scholarly community. As students of deterrence know, 6 decades of homicide rates fail to show, whether you are a policeman, prison guard or ordinary citizen, that you are any safer from being a victim of homicide where they have the death penalty or use it more frequently. In fact for some people, like fanatics seeking martyrdom, the risk or even certainty of death acts as an incentive to kill.
For 2 governors to go head to head on such a subject is an unusual event. Owens leads a state that has little death penalty experience, and he does not appear to have looked much in the criminological literature that shows what the penalty is and what it does. Ryan, a former death penalty supporter, was forced by painful circumstances to personally tackle the issue. He was wise enough to appoint a remarkably able group of experts to change his mind. America, he noted, executes more people than any other nation except China and Iran. The state of Michigan, having abolished the death penalty over 150 years ago, can be thankful that it is not part of this problem.
(source: Column; Eugene G. Wanger, who was a delegate to Michigans Constitutional Convention of 1961, where he authored the state constitutional prohibition of the death penalty. Since 1972, he has co-chaired, with Tom Downs, the Michigan Committee Against Capital Punishment; Lansing City Pulse)
