“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” are three rights guaranteed
to us by our government in the Declaration of Independence. A government which swears
to uphold those rights; enshrining their importance by deeming them “inalienable.”
The 14th Amendment of the Unites States Constitution likewise
states, “nor shall any state deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within
its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Yet there appears to be a double standard, or
rather an incongruence between the words which built our government and the
actions they employ to achieve the perceived intent of those words. If “life”
is a right that we are naturally entitled to, how can our government withhold the
power to remove it?
Personally I believe that “life” is a right which can never
be deprived. Yet, in a purely theoretical viewpoint you can argue that an eye
for an eye could potentially qualify as Justice. While I might not agree with
you, I concede there may be a legitimate foundation for such a claim to stand
on. However, one of the flaws I find in the “eye for an eye” theory is that the
margin for error is far too great. What if you’re wrong, and what if the “due
process” isn’t as infallible as we are led to believe? An eye for an eye may
not be an injustice to some, but losing an eye for doing nothing is. And
because there is no way to ensure that you are always correct in your
evaluation and investigation, such actions should never be taken.
I’m not merely alleging
the government has wrongfully deprived someone of the right to life before;
it is a data-driven fact. A study conducted by Samuel Gross of the University
of Michigan and Barbara O’Brien of Michigan State was analyzed by Time magazine. According to Time, “Authors
of the study say that their ‘conservative estimate of the proportion of
erroneous convictions’ is 4.1 percent’... This could mean that approximately
120 of the roughly 3,000 inmates on death row in America might not be guilty… ”
A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences led to startling conclusions. Newsweek,
who wrote an analysis of the study, deduced, “Since
1973, 144 people on death row have been exonerated. As a percentage of all
death sentences, that's just 1.6 percent. But if the innocence rate is 4.1
percent, more than twice the rate of exoneration, the study suggests what most
people assumed but dreaded: An untold number of innocent people have been
executed.”
A quintessential example of an
innocent man being executed occurred in 2004, when Cameron Todd Willingham was
killed by lethal injection for allegedly murdering his three children by means
of arson. He was convicted due to forensic
experts who testified that he intentionally set fire to the house. As
innocenceproject.org explains, “Thirteen years later, in the days
leading up to Willingham’s execution, his attorneys sent the governor and the
Board of Pardon and Parole a report from Gerald Hurst , a nationally recognized arson expert, saying that
Willingham’s conviction was based on erroneous forensic analysis. Documents
obtained by the Innocence Project show that state officials received that
report but apparently did not act on it.” Willingham was then executed. Several months
after his death, the Chicago Tribune
released an investigative report which found the evidence used against
Willingham to be fallacious and unfounded.
The death penalty is the outcome
of Due Process, which is symbolic of the system of achieving Justice in
America. According to UMBC Professor Jeffrey Davis, “Justice
should be conceptualized as a process whose purpose is to reconstitute the
equilibrium of human dignity and not simply as an end result.” He goes on to
assert that you “can’t just look at guilty or not guilty, because you ignore its
contributions to transitional justice.” The death penalty takes a process that
should be continuous and makes it finite, and in doing so forever robs the 4%
of individuals, such as Willingham, who are innocent on death row of the
opportunity to seek their own justice. The justice system is not perfect. That
is a fact. We must acknowledge that reality by banning the death penalty.
Justice can be achieved in other ways, and the death penalty – which many view
as the ultimate form of retribution – is only a temporary means of appeasement.
Justice is a flawed process, but a process everyone is entitled to nonetheless.
Murdering someone who isn’t guilty of the crimes they have been convicted deprives
them of their right to life and their right to benefit from the process of Justice,
but murdering someone who truly is guilty of the crimes they have been
convicted for, still deprives someone of their right to life and only
temporarily satisfies those who are seeking Justice in its most holistic form.
I encourage you to join the National
Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a group which consists of 90 million
Americans who explicitly believe the death penalty is wrong. Take their pledge,
and use the tools on their site to keep yourself, and others, informed on this
injustice.
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