The U.S. Department of Justice decision to seek the death penalty in the case of Payton Gendron, accused of killing 10 people in a racist attack at a Buffalo supermarket in May 2022, “continues the federal government’s vacillation on capital punishment,” the LA Times Editorial Board wrote this week. Pointing out that “only China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt put more people to death each year than the United States,” the Board states that “it’s time for Biden to keep his promise to end the federal death penalty and align the U.S. with nations that respect law, justice and human life by doing away with the archaic cruelty of death sentences and executions.”
“The death penalty has always been, and continues to be, a regional punishment favored in the most violent, politically conservative states: the Confederate states and their bordering neighbors,” Billy Sinclair writes in “Religion and the Death Penalty’s Most Devout Supporters: “Father Forgive them, for They Know Not What They Are Doing” in the Crime Report. Sinclair focuses on the tragic death by suicide of 34-year-old Terence Andrus, sentenced to death in Texas for a 2008 murder he committed when he was 20 and high on PCP-laced marijuana.
“The lesson learned from the mistakes of the past are important to any society that hopes to do better than previous generations,” the Death Penalty Information Center notes in its Special Report, “Compromised Justice: How A Legacy of Racial Violence Informs Missouri’s Death Penalty Today.” According to DPIC, Missouri’s death penalty has been applied discriminatorily based on race” since “the first reported lynching in U.S. history” occurred there in 1938, to today, when it “has consistently executed people in the last five years.”
Convicting a person for a crime they didn’t commit “is one of the greatest travesties of the criminal justice system,” the National Institute of Justice states in its recent report, “The Impact of False or Misleading Forensic Evidence on Wrongful Convictions.“ NIJ, the research, development, and evaluation agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, conducted a study of the causes of wrongful convictions, focusing on forensic science as one of the areas “partly to blame.” The result is a study that identifies the specific types of errors associated with forensic evidence “is essential to identify past problems, mitigate future errors, and support the development of targeted, systems-based reforms by forensic practitioners.”
