Capital Punishment Series

There are logical arguments in favor of capital punishment, at least in theory. The simplest is that when a person commits the ultimate crime of murder, he deserves to pay the ultimate price by sacrificing his own life as payment for his crime.

However, the death penalty does not exist in theory but only as it is applied in the real world. And this is how it must be judged.

In the real world, capital punishment is rare, ineffective, fatally flawed and unfixable, as well as unnecessary.

The main reason capital punishment does not work is because it is extremely rare. In the United States, 36 states maintain the death penalty. Yet, only 25% of those states have executed at least one person per year since 1977, when states began executing inmates again after a ten-year moratorium. Further, only one state -- Texas -- has executed more than four people per year since 1977.

Nationally, there were 592,580 murders and nonnegligent homicides from 1977 to 2006, an average of 19,752 killings per year. During this time, there were only 7,225 death sentences, an average of 241 death sentences per year, and only 1,099 executions for an average of 37 executions per year.

So, 1.2% of killings nationally lead to death sentences and only 0.185% of killers have thus far been executed. These numbers include non death penalty states, yet even when looking only at death penalty states, only 2.2% of killers are sentenced to death. Even Texas -- which has executed 37% of all death row inmates in the US since 1977 -- sentences only 1.6% of its killers to death and thus far has executed only 0.63% of its murderers! In other words, more than 98% of killers in Texas will not die for their crimes.

In North Carolina, we average about 14.5 death sentences and 1.6 executions per year, in spite of suffering approximately 594 murders annually. This means we sentence about 2.4% of our killers to death, and thus far have executed only 0.27% of our killers.

The rare nature of capital punishment is precisely why it is so ineffective at achieving its goals of retribution, deterrence and incapacitation. That is, capital punishment does not achieve justice for society or for relatives of murder victims, does not scare would-be murderers, and does not kill enough murderers to have any impact on the murder rate.

Studies from dozens of states have shown that executions do not serve as a greater deterrent to murder than alternative punishments such as life imprisonment. Recent studies purporting to show a deterrent effect of executions have been falsified in subsequent replication efforts. In fact, when one study claiming to show that each execution saves 18 lives was replicated, the second test found that every execution was associated with 18 more murders!

All of us want to believe that executions deter murder, because it is logical to assume they do. Yet, the evidence contradicts our expectations, probably because when people commit murder, they typically are acting impulsively and without regard to any potential punishment. Further, studies of top experts in the nation -- including criminologists, death penalty scholars, and even law enforcement chiefs -- show that people who study this issue for a living think the death penalty does not deter murder.

Because the death penalty offers nothing above and beyond life imprisonment, capital punishment is excessive. That is, we can achieve our penal goals of retribution, deterrence, and incapacitation with other forms of punishment.

Perhaps then it should not be surprising that, when citizens are given the alternative of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, 48% choose that option versus 47% who choose the death penalty. In other words, Americans really do not support the death penalty. Not only do they fail to choose it in public opinion polls when given alternatives, they rarely impose it as jurors even for the worst murderers.

And all of this says nothing about the major problems with the application of capital punishment in the United States and North Carolina.

Part Two: Biased, Costly, Broken

Not only does capital punishment fail to meet its goals of retribution, incapacitation, and deterrence, it is also fatally flawed.

First, the application of the death penalty in the United States is plagued by significant biases based on race, social class, and gender.

Nationally, 42% of death row inmates are black and 34% of those executed since 1977 have been black. In North Carolina, 89 of the 166 people currently sitting on death row are black (54%) and 13 of the 43 people executed by the state since 1984 have been black (30%). Compare this with the percentage of blacks in the nation and the state of North Carolina -- 13% and 22%, respectively.

While blacks are overrepresented among capital punishment populations based on demographics, this is not true when compared to the portion of murders they commit. Data show that blacks commit about 50% of murders nationally and in the state.

Nationally, blacks are actually underrepresented on death row and among those executed. Why? Because of whom they kill. Simply stated, killers of whites are far more likely to be executed than killers of blacks, regardless of the race of the killer. For whatever reason, white murder victims seem to be "worth more" to the justice system than black murder victims.

In North Carolina, whites made up about 43% of murder victims from 1999 to 2006. Yet, 67% of people on death row killed a white person. Prosecutors (who are disproportionately white) are more likely to seek the death penalty, and juries (who are also disproportionately white) are more likely to seek the death penalty when the murder victim is white.

This is especially true when the killer is black and the victim is white. In the US since 1977, 213 blacks who killed whites have been executed, versus only 15 whites who killed blacks. In North Carolina since 1999, the picture is similar; there have been at least six executions of black males who killed whites (four of those killed white females), versus 0 executions of white males who killed blacks.

According to FBI crime data from North Carolina, blacks are more likely to kill whites than whites are to kill blacks. For example, from 1999 to 2006, 23% of whites were killed by blacks, versus only 5% of blacks who were killed by whites. Thus, blacks were about 3.6 times more likely to kill whites than whites were to kill blacks. Yet, during this same time, there were 10.2 times more black killers of whites on North Carolina death row than white killers of blacks. This means race does play a major role in death penalty cases in the state, as it does in the nation.

Virtually every person on death row is also poor, consistent with the evidence that what determines who gets executed is not the heinousness of the crime but the quality of the defense. A popular saying is that there is a reason we call it capital punishment, because those without the capital get the punishment.

And citizens in every state with capital punishment are remarkably squeamish about executing women. Women make up about 10% of murderers in any given year and yet only about 1% of executions in the modern era.

Second, capital punishment is very costly. For every execution in North Carolina, taxpayers must pay more than $2 million above the costs of a life sentence. Studies from numerous states find similar results, including in California, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, New Jersey, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington. This is an enormous waste of resources -- amounting to billions of dollars -- that could be invested in crime prevention strategies that would save lives.

Third, and probably most important, there is a serious risk that capital punishment will be used against the factually innocent. Not only do we know that 121 people in twenty-five states have been released from death row since 1976, but we discover about five erroneous murder convictions every year. Six people have been freed from death row in North Carolina, and other innocent people sit on death row still.

There is also no doubt that states have recently executed innocent people. Clear cases of innocence have emerged in Texas, Missouri, Florida, and Virginia.

Part Three: Fixing the Unfixable, or Stopping Once and For All?

Judged by any standard, the death penalty is a failed policy. It fails to meet its goals, and its costs clearly outweigh its modest benefits.

Capital punishment fails mostly because it is so rare. Stated simply, it is not used enough to make any difference for crime victims or larger society. Further, for even those handful of families that see their loved one's murderer executed, they must wait an average of 11 years for the chance at closure, and the majority of those families don’t achieve it because of the execution.

Bud Welch lost his 23-year old daughter Julie in the Oklahoma City bombing committed by Timothy McVeigh. Although Welch first wanted McVeigh to die, he grew to think that killing McVeigh would not make him feel any better. So, he wrote, in part: "You can’t think of enough adjectives to describe the rage, revenge, and hate I felt. But after time, I was able to examine my conscience, and I realized that if McVeigh is put to death, it won’t help me in the healing process. People talk about executions bringing closure. But how can there be closure when my little girl is never coming back."

Death penalty supporters may react with a call for more executions. Logically, that would make capital punishment more effective at achieving retribution, deterrence, and incapacitation. But the reality is that prosecutors are not willing to seek the punishment, juries are not willing to impose it, and counties and states are unwilling to pay the enormous costs to carry out the death penalty with any greater frequency. In other words, capital punishment is unfixable.

We also know from very careful research that the more that states impose death sentences, the more likely they are to make mistakes. In the recent series hosted on the campus of Appalachian State University, "The Real Death Penalty: Capital Punishment in America," top scholars from around the region explained why wrongful convictions occur in capital cases. Each and every scholar stated emphatically that as long as we continue to practice capital punishment, it is guaranteed that we will continue to make mistakes. The only question is whether we will catch them all before we execute another innocent person.

The stories of some of the actual exonerees -- real people released after spending years of their lives on death row for crimes they did not commit -- were moving, and knowing them inspires scholars to push for change in capital punishment policy so that no more innocent people are wrongly executed in our names.

The only right thing to do is to end executions once and for all. Fourteen states and the District of Columbia already live without the death penalty. Additionally, even most death penalty states almost never carry out an execution.

The vast majority of our allies also live without capital punishment. In fact, the United States stands as the only Western, industrialized country that maintains the death penalty. The US stands with countries such as China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Jordan, and Singapore as the top ten countries in the world still practicing capital punishment. That's hardly good company.

These facts show that capital punishment is something we could easily live without. For the most part, it is something we already live without.

The General Assembly should abolish capital punishment. It is ineffective, inefficient, plagued by serious problems, and unfixable.

To help bring about this reality, the Boone Town Council and Watauga County Board of Commissioners ought to take a stand now by passing resolutions calling for the District Attorney to agree to not seek death sentences in any murder case and for the state of North Carolina to end capital punishment.

Although many murderers deserve to die, this is not the issue. The issue is whether we should kill them, knowing that capital punishment is a failed policy. The issue is whether we want to contribute to the problems by participating in it or be part of the solution by saying, enough!

Matthew Robinson is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Appalachian State University. He teaches and does research on capital punishment and is the author of the book, Death Nation: The Experts Explain American Capital Punishment (Prentice Hall, 2008).