The death penalty’s history in the United States is long and complicated. Allowed unabated for centuries, the death penalty came under intense scrutiny in the 1970s when the Supreme Court overturned it by stating that it was not applied constitutionally. Georgia, the originating state of the case, made changes to its death penalty statutes and then went back to court, winning a reversal.
Since 1976, anti-death penalty advocates have argued continuously for an end to this inhumane practice. Anti-death penalty activists come from a variety of backgrounds and believe in the abolition of the death penalty for a number of reasons, including the innocence factor and and the prevalence of racism and classism in the justice system.
Innocence Factor
When Illinois Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on the death penalty in 2000, many anti-death penalty advocates were shocked, as Gov. Ryan supports the death penalty in theory. He believed that the number of people being freed from death row because DNA evidence proved their innocence was enough to halt the practice temporarily. Indeed, scores of death row inmates have been freed over the last decade because of DNA evidence, which is available in only about 15% of death penalty cases. The innocence factor argument suggests that if at least one person in the remaining 85% of non-DNA cases is innocent, that is enough to stop the death penalty.
Racism and the Death Penalty
According to the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, an African American man convicted of murdering a white woman is up to 11 times more likely to receive the death penalty than a white woman who kills an African American man. Not surprisingly, this discrepancy is highest in Southern states. At every stage of the process, from suspects to sentencing, African American men proceed to the next stage at proportionately higher percentages than white men, suggesting the prevalence of racism within the justice system is sending African American men to the death chambers in large numbers.
Classism and the Death Penalty
The U.S. justice system is set up under a theoretical “innocent until proven guilty” ideology. Yet prosecutors have often unlimited funds to prosecute people convicted of capital crimes while poor defendants have to rely on overworked, underpaid public defenders with scant budgets. The number of low-income defendants who receive the death penalty is higher than the number of defendants who can afford to hire their own lawyers, suggesting the imbalance between prosecution and public defense budgets accounts for some of the people on death row.
Even for people who support the idea of the death penalty, innocence, racism, and classism can be deterrents to supporting the practice of the death penalty under our current justice system. For anti-death penalty proponents, these factors are just the tip of why the death penalty is not the solution to dealing with crime.
Brandi Rhoades - Brandi Rhoades is a freelance writer working on articles for the web, ranging from blog posts to marketing letters to keyword-driven ...
