Over 400 media outlets around the country reported on DPIC's recent 2011 Year-End Report. Coverage included stories on the dramatic drop in death sentences, the decline in executions, and fewer states having the death penalty. Articles appeared in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Reuters, USA Today, CNN, TIME, and many other papers. National broadcast outlets such as NBC's Nightly News, National Public Radio's Morning Editiion, and CBS Radio ran pieces, and the headline news was noted on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Other coverage appeared on over 100 local radio and TV stations. Among the papers writing editorials on the trends cited in the report were, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Dallas Morning News. The L.A. Times’s editorial noted, “The Death Penalty Information Center's annual report on capital punishment in America, released Thursday, showed that executions continued to drop in 2011, to 43; that's down from 85 in 2000 and 46 last year. More significantly, the number of death sentences across the country fell dramatically this year, to 78 from 112 in 2010. And perhaps most significant of all, the percentage of Americans who say they support the death penalty, which was 80% in 1994, fell to 61%, the lowest ever.” The Washington Post's editorial attributed the decline in death sentences in part to the decreasing confidence in the capital punishment system, noting, “The risk of executing an innocent person must weigh heavily in the debate. There can be no denying that the criminal justice system makes mistakes… Public safety and appropriate punishment for the worst crimes can be achieved through life sentences without the danger of taking an innocent life.” The Dallas Morning News editorial echoed the same hesitation when it comes to the death penalty, saying “The justice system will never be foolproof, and, therefore, use of the death penalty is never justified.”
In a recent op-ed in the New York Daily News, former New York Governor Mario Cuomo called the death penalty a "serious moral problem" that is "corrosive" to a democratic citizenry. He said many of the problems of the death penalty--ineffectiveness as a deterrent, unfairness, and the risk of executing the innocent--are inevitable: "These imperfections - as well as the horrible and irreversible injustice they can produce - are inevitable. In this country, a defendant is convicted on proof beyond a reasonable doubt - not proof that can be known with absolute certainty. There's no such thing as absolute certainty in our law." He advocated for alternative punishments for murder, particularly life in prison without the possibility of parole: "There is a punishment that is much better than the death penalty: one that juries will not be reluctant to impose; one that is so menacing to a potential killer, that it could actually deter; one that does not require us to be infallible so as to avoid taking an innocent life; and one that does not require us to stoop to the level of the killers." Cuomo mentioned the execution of Troy Davis as an example of the risks posed by the uncertainties in the system. As governor, Cuomo repeatedly vetoed legislation to restore New York's death penalty. Read full op-ed below.
In a recent op-ed in the L.A. Times, Professor Jennifer L. Mnookin (pictured) of the UCLA Law School provided an analysis of how preconceptions and biases toward the unconventional suspects known as the West Memphis Three may have led to their wrongful convictions and a death sentence in Arkansas in 1994. Because of the grisly nature of the murders, investigators decided early on that it was probably related to satanic cult rituals. This theory pointed them to Damien Echols, who was a self-described Wiccan with an unusual taste in clothes and music. Mnookin explained that "cognitive biases" - the tendency of humans to see what they expect to see - played a role in these convictions. Mnookin wrote, "Investigators and prosecutors, even when they are trying their best to do their jobs, may seek out or take special notice of evidence that confirms their prior beliefs rather than evidence that challenges it. And they are likely to interpret ambiguous evidence in ways that accord with their preconceptions." For example, the police interviewed Echols's friend, Jessie Misskelley, who had an IQ of 72, and accepted his account of the crime even though it contradicted the evidence. Mnookin wrote, "The prosecutor's case was based largely on character assassination, innuendo and the not-very-credible testimony of the likes of a jailhouse snitch and a witness with a mail-order doctorate. Not a shred of physical evidence linked any of the young men to the crime scene (and post-conviction DNA testing has also failed to find any biological evidence that they were there)." Mnookin noted that at least three of the most common causes of wrongful conviction were present in the West Memphis Three case: dubious forensic evidence, false confessions and evidence from an unreliable jailhouse informants. She attributed the recent release of the defendants partly to the work of documentary filmmakers who investigated the case. Read full op-ed below.
An op-ed by Bob Herbert of the New York Times highlights issues raised by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens that changed his mind on the death penalty in the U.S. Herbert cites information collected by the Death Penalty Information Center and points to shoddy defense and state misconduct in the deliberate withholding of evidence as prominent abuses in the system. “Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept through crucial proceedings. Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers — as well as lawyers who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct — have been assigned to indigent defendants.” According to Herbert, “The egregious problems identified by Justice Stevens (and other prominent Americans who have changed their minds in recent years about capital punishment) have always been the case. The awful evidence has always been right there for all to see, but mostly it has been ignored. The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an abomination — a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist affront to the very idea of justice.” Read full op-ed below.
