How about this -- Capital Punishment's just plain WRONG!

Who is entitled to play God?

1,000th U.S. prisoner about to die
Opponents say the question must be asked: Can the U.S. government be trusted not to execute an innocent person?
Nov. 25, 2005. 04:22 AM
BRADLEY BROOKS
ASSOCIATED PRESS

NEW YORK—"Let's do it."

With those last words, convicted killer Gary Gilmore ushered in the modern era of capital punishment in the United States, an age of busy death chambers that will likely see its 1,000th execution within days.

After a 10-year moratorium, Gilmore in 1977 became the first person to be executed following a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision that validated state laws to reform the capital punishment system. Since then, 997 prisoners have been executed, and next week, the 998th, 999th and 1,000th are scheduled to die.

Robin Lovitt, 41, will likely be the one to earn that macabre distinction Wednesday. He was convicted of fatally stabbing a man with scissors during a 1998 pool hall robbery in Virginia.

Ahead of Lovitt on death row are Eric Nance, scheduled for execution on Monday in Arkansas, and John Hicks, due to die on Tuesday in Ohio. Both executions appear likely to proceed.

Gilmore was executed by a Utah firing squad, after a record of petty crime, killing of a motel manager and suicide attempts in prison. His life was the basis for Norman Mailer's book The Executioner's Song and a TV miniseries.

While his case was well-known, most today could probably not name even one of the more than 3,400 on death row. In the last 28 years, the U.S. has executed on average one person every 10 days.

The focus of the debate on capital punishment was once on whether it served as a deterrent to crime. Today, the argument is more on whether the government can be trusted not to execute an innocent person.
Thomas Hill, a lawyer for a death row inmate in Ohio who recently won a second stay of execution, thinks the answer is obvious. "We have a criminal system that makes mistakes. If you accept that proposition, that means you have to be prepared for the inevitability that some are sentenced to death for crimes they didn't commit," he said.

But advocates of the death penalty argue that its opponents are elitist liberals who are ignoring the real victims.

"Since 1999 we've had 100,000 innocent people murdered in the U.S., but nobody is planning on commemorating all those people killed," said Michael Paranzino, president of Throw Away the Key, a group that supports the death penalty.

Race is also a key question in the debate. Since 1976, 58 per cent of those executed in the U.S. were white while 34 per cent were black, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. But non-Latino whites make up 75 per cent of the U.S. population, while non-Latino blacks comprise just over 12 per cent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Some supporters say ending the death penalty would be harmful to poor minorities, who are disproportionately murder victims. "Increasingly violent crime is primarily for working class folks, poor people and people of colour," Paranzino said.

Opponents of capital punishment also point to the unfair role of class and race in death penalty cases. "There is tremendous arbitrariness to the death penalty ... the race of the victims has a lot to do with who winds up getting executed," said Barry Scheck, co-founder of the New York-based Innocence Project, a legal clinic that seeks to exonerate inmates through DNA testing.

Death sentences nationwide have dropped by 50 per cent since the late 1990s, with executions carried out down by 40 per cent, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Twelve states do not have the death penalty, and at least two have formal moratoriums on capital punishment.Canada abolished capital punishment from the Criminal Code on July 14, 1976, with a free vote in the House of Commons. In June 1987, a motion to reintroduce it was defeated 148-127 on a free vote, despite polls indicating majority support.

Canadian support for the death penalty has dropped through the years. A 2001 Ipsos-Reid poll showed 52 per cent of Canadians surveyed supported it — down from 69 per cent in 1995 and 73 in 1987.

An October Gallup poll showed 64 per cent of Americans support use of the death penalty. But that is the lowest level in 27 years, down from a high of 80 per cent in 1994.

Still, some powerful political forces are looking to speed up the trying and executing of prisoners. Both houses of the U.S. Congress are considering bills that would lessen the ability of defendants in capital cases to appeal to federal courts.

Proponents of the legislation say appeals can add 15 years to the process of executing a prisoner. Detractors say the law will not allow federal courts to review most cases and will result in executing innocent people.
Since 1973, 122 prisoners have been freed from death row. The vast majority of those cases came during the last 15 years, since the use of DNA evidence became widespread. While there is no official proof an innocent person has been executed, opponents of the death penalty say the number of prisoners whose convictions have been reversed should fuel skepticism.

"I don't think any rational person seriously examining the evidence can have any confidence that an innocent hasn't already been executed," said Scheck.

Using post-conviction DNA evidence, the Innocence Project has helped in more than half of the 163 cases vacated — 14 of which were from death row. "We've demonstrated that there are too many innocent people on death row," Scheck said.

But that argument doesn't impress Charles Rosenthal, district attorney for Harris County, Tex., which has sent more prisoners to the death chamber — 85 — than any other U.S. county and all but two states, Texas and Virginia, statistics show.

"I don't know about every death penalty case in Texas, but I feel quite sure that no one that this office has had anything to do with was factually innocent," Rosenthal said.

Scheck believes Rosenthal's claim is based "more on faith than fact." He noted that the police DNA lab in Houston has been shut down since 2002 because an investigation found problems with poor training and contaminated evidence.

"What kind of confidence can you have when the jurisdiction that executes more people than any other is fraught with unreliable testing results?" he said.

In at least two cases, questions are being raised about whether an innocent person was put to death. Larry Griffin was executed in St. Louis in 1995 for the fatal 1980 shooting of a 19-year-old drug dealer. His conviction rested largely on testimony of a career criminal who's now said to have been lying. Ruben Cantu was executed in Texas in 1993 for killing a man during a robbery attempt in 1984, when he was 17. Now witnesses and a co-defendant say he was innocent.

Virginia Governor Mark Warner is examining Lovitt's case, and could decide on clemency this weekend. DNA tests on scissors used in the stabbing were inconclusive, and the scissors were later thrown away. Lawyer Kenneth Starr (who famously investigated former president Bill Clinton) says the death penalty should not apply to Lovitt for reasons "including above all right now the destruction of the DNA evidence."