DPIC
In its new report, “Fool’s Gold: How the Federal Death Penalty Has Perpetuated Racially Discriminatory Practices Throughout History,” the Death Penalty Information Center makes the case for “a direct connection between the extra-judicial lynchings and racial disparate policies of the past and the active federal death sentences in the present.” The report also debunks the argument that the federal death penalty is the “gold standard of capital punishment systems” because it provides exemplary legal representation for people accused of a limited number of exceptional crimes. Instead, DPIC says its research is as flawed as state death penalty systems, “including arbitrariness, ineffective legal representation, and racial bias.”
In their article “The Law Must Respond When Science Changes,” David Faigman and Jeff Kukucka in Scientific American examine “where science and law intersect” and argue that while “the law seeks to provide fair process in a timely fashion, science seeks to discover truth over time. This means that what was once fair may become unfair; the justice of yesteryear may be unjust today.”
Their case in point is recent developments in two cases: Robert Roberson’s, who was sentenced to death on the debunked medical theory of shaken baby syndrome, and the Menendez brothers, who were sentenced to life in prison for the murders of their parents, José and Kitty Menendez, without evidence of their childhood abuse ever being considered as a valid or justifiable defense. “In both cases, scientific understanding changed years ago. Shaken baby syndrome was called into question in the early 2010s, and, years before that, psychologists identified the relationship between the trauma of childhood abuse and violence,” they argue.
“All three men have struggled to reopen their cases,” Faigman and Kukucka point out. “An essential principle of science is that it might change as research accumulates. That is a principle that the law has largely failed to come to grips with. This failure threatens the constitutional guarantee of due process.”
In his study, “After 1,600 Executions, the Public and Police are Safer in States with No Death Penalty,” in Substack, Robert Dunham cites the recently-released “Homicide Study,” which looks at 30 years of FBI homicide data, that finds that, “Contrary to the myth, the data strongly suggest that the death penalty makes no measurable contribution to public safety. The public was not safer in death penalty states and did not become safer over time the longer a state had the death penalty.” In fact, according to the study’s data, states that never had a death penalty had the lowest murder rates — “1.37 times lower than in the long-time death penalty states and 1.32 times lower than in the U.S. as a whole.” According to Dunham, “From a public safety perspective, the death penalty has been a pointless exercise in cruelty.”
