A letter in today’s edition of the New York Times revisits something I’ve mentioned in the past: The American judicial system cannot be trusted to reliably decide who lives and dies, and for that reason the evidential bar must be raised dramatically or the death penalty should be abolished.
To the Editor:
I practiced as a criminal defense attorney for many years and tried a lot of murder cases, including death penalty cases. The conclusion that I reached after all those years was quite simple. The American criminal justice system is not competent to decide who lives and who dies. That conclusion is supported in the news on an almost daily basis. The death penalty is a bridge too far.
CLARK LANDRUM, TIFTON, GA.
My first freelance assignments were true crime pieces for the old (now defunct) true crime magazines: True Crime, Headquarters Detective, et cetera. I spent a lot of time sitting in rural courthouse basements reading through files, and that experience left me with no philosophical objection per se to the death penalty; there are people who need to be dead, and the sooner the better. But it left me, also, with a deep lack of confidence in the ability of the judicial system to reliably determine who those people are.
Cops and prosecutors sometimes lie on the theory that Bubba belongs in jail; if he didn’t commit this crime he’ll commit some other. Juries are harder on others than they are on defendants they can recognize as somehow like themselves — on and on. And a lot of Americans are more affected by theater, even bad theater, than facts. If the evidence standard is not raised decisively — a DNA connection documented by two different laboratories, at least one of them independent of the prosecution, or a guilty plea accompanied by the location of the body, say — a conviction should not be eligible for the death penalty.