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Capital Punishment: How sure is sure?
Federal Public Defender Moscow, Idaho Our
criminal justice system in the United States requires proof beyond a
reasonable doubt in order to find a defendant guilty. Beginning about
ten years ago and increasingly during the last five years, courts have
reversed a significant number of wrongful convictions upon discovering that
the jury's finding of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" was wrong.
There have been over 100 exonerations from death row since capital punishment
was reinstated in 1973, averaging 2.75 per year the first 20 years, and
growing to almost double that figure, 5.3 per year over the last ten
years. There have been over 100 exonerations in both capital and
non-capital cases based solely on DNA evidence. The DNA exonerations
arose primarily in rape cases. The lesson of both sets of exonerations is
that eyewitness identifications are much less reliable than juries tend to
believe. Given the significant number of innocents released from death
row, can we be confident that we are not executing innocent people? |