Earlier in the month, a Massachusetts jury sentenced Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to death for the 2013 terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon. Last week, Nebraska lawmakers repealed the death penalty, overriding their governor's veto. As the death penalty dominates national conversation across the media, North by Northwestern looked at other recent capital punishment controversies and spoke to Northwestern professors and religious leaders about their perspectives on this divisive issue.
Recent Controversial Executions in the US
Brush up on your death penalty history with a look at 10 of the most controversial executions in recent history.
Father Tim Higgins is a campus minister at the Sheil Catholic Center.
“The Catholic church is against the death penalty for two purposes: first, the redemptive nature of all of us as human beings, even if we kill someone, and second, the Ten Commandments say we should not kill, so the decision to kill is not something we can make,” Higgins said. “The cross was the death penalty of Jesus’ time, so if he were here today, he would be killed by lethal injection.”
He also pointed out that external factors play an important and concerning role in capital punishment.
“A majority of the people being put to death are people of color, so this issue ties into a bigger one about economic and racial inequality, which directly relates to Catholic social teaching,” Higgins said. “We have to ask why people are being put to death, but also who these people being put to death are, where they are coming from, and what other injustices led to their actions.”
Some statistics suggest that people of color are disproportionately affected by the death penalty. Yale Law School found that African-American defendants are 300% more likely to be sentenced to death than white defendants when the victim of the crime was white, and African Americans make up over 40% of the death row population.
Rabbi Aaron Potek is the campus rabbi at NU Hillel.
“The death penalty is in the Torah, and there are multiple instances of putting someone to death by human hands, so on the surface that might seem to be pro-death penalty. But if we look a little closer, those instances all involve direct conference with God,” Potek said. “Matters of life in death are in God’s hands, not human ones.”
Potek also referenced examples from other Jewish texts, like the Talmud and the Mishna, to show that there is no single Jewish perspective on the death penalty. He said that Judaism is generally less of a doctrinal religion, and that it does not “compel a lot of beliefs.”
However, he argued, “if a Jew is in favor of the death penalty, they would need to believe that it can only be used in rare circumstances, and following a court system very different from the one we see in America. There would need to be some element of divine approval.”
Though use of the death penalty is certainly not rare in the United States, it is on the decline. More than a third of all states have abolished the death penalty, but even states where it remains legal are opting out. Only seven states even carried out executions in 2014, and by the end of that year, executions had hit a two-decade low.
Prof. Alec Klein teaches investigative journalism in Medill and directs the Medill Justice Project, a journalism enterprise investigating potentially wrongful convictions and general issues of criminal justice.
He describes his work as intense and difficult, but meaningful.
“It’s time consuming, intensive investigation that can take anywhere from a few weeks to years,” Klein said. “We’re working intensive hours, knocking on doors, tracing down witnesses, and persuading reluctant sources to talk: all the classic forms of investigative, hard hitting journalism. It’s honorable work, but it’s very difficult.”
Though Klein is not an advocate for or against the death penalty, his work raises questions about the potential implications of executing an innocent person.
“There have been more than 300 exonerations based on DNA, but there have also been exonerations based on other evidence, like coerced confessions, human error or new evidence,” Klein said. “This is an important issue in context of the death penalty, given that if we know that some people are wrongfully convicted, how does that factor into our thinking about executing them?”
Sometimes, our own eyes can deceive us when it comes to recognizing criminals.
“An eyewitness is one of the most persuasive ways to present information against the accused to a jury, but in many cases it isn’t accurate,” Klein said. “Memory is malleable: what we think we remember can be influenced or impacted by other factors.”
Eyewitness testimony was the single greatest cause of flawed evidence in innocent exonerations, according to one study of 250 exonerated prisoners. Though many people think they can trust their own memory, it is often influenced by the intense emotions of witnessing a crime, suggestive questioning in the courtroom, and visual distortions like time of day, distance from the crime and lighting.
Rob Owen is a Northwestern Law School professor and lawyer who has represented more than 50 prisoners facing the death penalty.
He has spent most of his career fighting the death penalty, and his passion for this issue comes from his beliefs about humanity and equality.
“I have known a lot of people who have committed murder, and I can tell you that they’re not uniquely evil people,” Owen said. “A lot of people, having experienced the same kinds of deprivation and mistreatment as children, could have ended up doing the same thing. Supporters of death penalty see those on death row as monsters, but they’re not: they’re just people who have done monstrous things.”
Owen also pointed out that poverty often dooms defendants to death row, regardless of the details of their case.
“The one thing that unites all prisoners I’ve known on death row is that nobody has any money,” Owen said. “How much money you have generally determines the quality of the defense you get. There are some heroic public defenders that make up for their lack of resources by skill, commitment, or zeal, but there are many more cases where they are outgunned by the prosecution’s resources.”
Studies have shown that poor people are more likely to be convicted than wealthier people, even if the crime is the same, and the ACLU found that 95% of death row inmates in Alabama were classified as indigent.
Owen also touched on some of the main arguments made in favor of the death penalty. According to a Pew study from March of this year, about one third of Americans believe that the death penalty serves as a deterrent for serious crime. Owen, however, disagrees, arguing that people committing these crimes are not acting rationally or logically.
“Most of the people I’ve represented who’ve committed murder were either drunk or high at the time, and many had mental illness or cognitive impairments,” Owen said. “These are not people who are making deliberate choices about their actions based on long-term consequences.”