CW: racism, death

On January 10, Dylann Roof was sentenced to death for the murder of nine black people in a Charleston church in 2015. His sentence has resulted in a renewed flurry of discussion surrounding the use of capital punishment in the United States. Though his sentence was the proximate inspiration for writing this article, I will not discuss Dylann Roof. He, as an individual, is unimportant to my argument.

The death penalty should be abolished. Even if you ignore the purely moralistic argument that the state should not kill people as punishment for killing people, the bulk of the research surrounding the death penalty argues for its discontinuation. There is no evidence for capital punishment deterring crime; in fact, some argue that executions actually have a brutalization effect, increasing crime. Sentencing someone to death is far more expensive than sentencing them to life without parole, due to the large expense associated with the lengthy appeals process that is a necessary part of capital punishment. And, finally, the death penalty is applied in a racist fashion; black Americans convicted of murder are far more likely than their white counterparts to be sentenced to death. Moreover, someone convicted of murder is more likely to be sentenced to death if their victim was white than if their victim as black. In fact, about 75% of murder cases that led to an execution had white victims, while, nationally, white people only make up 50% of murder victims.

But even if you stubbornly persist in supporting capital punishment the face of the aforementioned research -- if you continue to believe it is a deterrent or that it is not applied prejudicially or that the extra expense is worth it to punish someone -- consider this: the death penalty always runs the risk of executing an innocent person.

This is intuitive. Human beings are flawed, and therefore, it is impossible to design a justice system that is never wrong. Sometimes the perpetrator of a crime is never caught or is acquitted; often an innocent person is convicted of a crime they did not commit. And execution is, quite obviously, irreversible. It’s bad enough when a man like James Bain is exonerated and released from prison after serving 35 years for a crime he did not commit, but at least he’s still alive and now has his freedom of which he was wrongfully deprived.

It’s tempting to believe that the United States doesn’t execute the wrongfully convicted; after all, what’s the purpose of that pesky appeals process if not to root out those who are actually innocent?

Since 1976, 1,443 people have been executed in the United States. Since 1973, 156 death row inmates have been exonerated. A 2014 study estimated that 4.1% of those sentenced to death are actually innocent; but the exoneration rate (at that time) was only 1.6%. If these estimates are correct, less than half of the innocent people on death row are exonerated, while the remainder go on to be executed for a crime they did not commit.

And consider, for a moment, the composition of death row. Again, black defendants are more likely to be sentenced to death than white defendants, particularly if the murder victim in question was white. Once again, black Americans are subjected to even harsher treatment than white Americans for the same crime. This is not new, and it certainly isn’t limited to death row.

Troy Davis was convicted for the 1989 murder of a police officer in a Georgia parking lot, despite the fact that his companion that evening, Sylvester Coles, admitted to carrying a gun that evening, matching the gun used to kill the officer, and was identified by several witnesses as the killer. Coles was never considered a suspect. At trial, Davis was convicted based on little physical evidence and the testimony of nine eyewitnesses. However, seven of those eyewitnesses later recanted their testimony. Despite high profile public figures, such as Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu, and Pope Benedict XVI calling for a stay of execution, Davis was put to death by the state of Georgia in September 2011.

Then there’s George Stinney. Stinney was only fourteen when he was tried (by an all-white jury), convicted, and executed for the murder of two white girls. The evidence for his guilt was his confession, which modern experts believe was false and coerced. The jury only took ten minutes to deliberate, and Stinney was eventually executed by electric chair.

And, in case you were wondering, both Troy Davis and George Stinney were black.

This is unacceptable.

Even if you believe that the sole purpose of capital punishment is to exact as much revenge as possible, even if you believe it is worth the cost, it is absolutely unacceptable that our nation risks executing innocent people, and, despite the appeals process, that risk is very real. On top of that, black Americans once again bear the brunt of the suffering.

So, please, even if you find none of the other arguments against the death penalty persuasive:

Remember Troy Davis.

Remember George Stinney.

Remember all the others who were exonerated too late.

And think of those who were wrongly executed without our knowledge.