Radley Balko looks at evidence, now including videotape, that doctors Steven Hayne and Michael West faked forensic evidence used to send people to prison, in some cases for life sentences.
I believe the moral foundations for capital punishment in some cases are sound, given a perfect legal system. For instance, in the case of capital murder, in which someone planned malice aforethought in killing a specific invidual in cold blood, it seems to me that only capital punishment or life in prison are acceptable punishments. Anything else values the criminal’s life at less than the victim’s life.
However, given the legal system we actually have and the inevitability of having flawed people running it (and we’re all of us flawed), I can’t condone capital punishment absent stringent standards of evidence. Eyewitness testimony is obviously not reliable enough, and given a case like the above even supposedly scientific evidence may not always clear the hurdle. If a person doesn’t belive in capital punishment because of standards of evidence, what should those standards be?
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Here’s one way to look at it – basically, we are concerned that killing a prisoner would make it impossible to free him later if he were to be exonerated.
In that case, the first question to ask is, “how many people are freed from death row, or are exonerated posthumously, every year”? In other words, how big is the potential benefit? After all, an innocent man who dies of old age in prison sees no benefit here if is innocence is never recognized.
You might feel that even one save makes it all worthwhile, but of course everything comes at a cost. With our prisons at capacity, every prisoner you hold displaces another prisoner to be turned free. That cost is very real. The problem of lifers who run gangs and abuse and kill other prisoners is also non-trivial.
Of course, once our prisons are no longer at capacity, much of this cost disappears.
Personally, I think we have a duty to maintain a high standard of excellence when it comes to assigning guilt, death penalty or not – ruining a man with an undeserved 20 year sentence is plenty bad enough. In a well-run system, a death penalty is fine. A poorly-run system is always unacceptable, death penalty or not.
I don’t think the prisons are at over capacity because of death row inmates. There are 1.6 million people in prison in the U.S. and probably only a couple of thousand people at most on death row. (I’m leaving for work in a minute so I can’t Google it. Someone correct me if I’m wrong.)
I agree that the problem isn’t just death penalty cases. They’re just the most glaring examples of problems in the justice system.
Oh, I agree – folks on death row are only a tiny fraction of prisoners.
However, the effect I described is still real. Imagine you save a guy from the electric chair and hold him for 30 years instead. (Also assume your prisons remain at overcapacity). That 30 man-years of prison space has to come from somewhere – either 15 guys get an extra two years off, or 5 guys get six years off, but one way or another, these folks are back on the street.
Now assume we take 10 people off death row, and one of these men is later found innocent and saved. That’s awesome, but what’s the cost of those 300 man-years of prison space? How many extra crimes were committed by people who should have been in jail but who were out on the streets instead? 300 man-years is an awful lot, and the recidivism rate is very high, something like 50 percent. You can bet that some serious crimes have occurred as a result of this.
I don’t think anybody really knows how these number would work out, but I know how I’d wager, if I had to. It’s just something to consider.