Tuesday, February 10, 2015

Why hasn't this been brought up yet...?

"More than 4% of inmates sentenced to death in the United States are probably innocent." -Huffington Post, April 2014
In 2014 alone, 35 Americans were executed under the death penalty. According to this statistic in Huffington Post, approximately one or two (1.4 to be exact) of those people are statistically likely to be innocent.

Let's extend that to the beginning of the century. Between 2000 and 2014, 796 people have been executed in the United States as a result of capital punishment. Statistically, then, 31 or 32 (31.84, exactly) people have been falsely executed. This affects 32 people, 32 families, and most likely more than 32 friends.

Looking at the blog posts this week, there has been much talk about religion, economics, and international conflict. While these are all very important when taking a stance on capital punishment, we can't neglect to look at the fallacies that are bound to occur in the court process. It is not unheard of for the courts to falsely accuse someone of a crime. And it would honestly suck having to spend years in prison because of a crime that you didn't commit, but capital punishment is such a permanent court decision.

Though it can take decades to have a felon injected, it could potentially take longer for someone to figure out that this "felon" is innocent. Once they're injected, that's it. It's over.

I would like to say that we can solve this problem by attempting to improve the accuracy in court, but this is just too naive. Human error and subjectivity are too big in decision-making for them to be eliminated. Instead, we must take a look at the punishments and "solutions" we are utilizing.

I will stand on the side of those (potentially) 32 innocents. We cannot keep killing this percentage of innocent inmates.

1 comment:

  1. It certainly seems particularly egregious to think of someone being wrongfully executed. We know with certainty that in, for example, South Carolina in the pre-War period, there were several wrongful executions. George Stinney was executed at 14 in South Carolina due to a racist hysteria, and his conviction has been overturned.

    Of course, the counterargument is that life in prison is equally bad, and that it's always possible to get that wrong. There's certainly more time to rectify the decision, but time is still not infinite. Nonetheless, the prospect of killing an innocent is so heinous that most death penalty defenders will insist on a near perfect track record in the recent past. It's that important to making their case.

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