While most states are relaxing their stance on the death penalty, in part due to some diligent Northwestern students, others are taking the opposite approach. Six states are considering laws to loosen restrictions on executions, either by widening the range of crimes that can carry the death penalty or by requiring fewer jurors to approve it.
In Georgia, state representative Barry Fleming introduced a bill that would require as few as nine jurors to approve the death penalty, instead of the unanimous vote currently required. In Texas (big surprise), repeat child molesters could be executed, even if they did not murder their victims. The other states have proposals that would give death for murdering a law officer or for being an accomplice to murder.
According to the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center, at least 14 states have gone the other way and suspended the death penalty. Illinois imposed a moratorium on all executions in 2000, when evidence showed that death row inmates were more likely to get an exoneration than an execution. New Jersey had overturned 51 out of 60 death sentences since 1982, before a stay of executions was imposed. Meanwhile, 11 other states have stopped executions after botching lethal injections like they were Iraqi hangings.
One the problems people bring up with the death penalty is wrongful convictions, the driving force behind the more significant moratoria. Increasing the number of capital cases would seem to lead to a greater chance of wrongful conviction. However, Rob Warden, executive director of the Center for Wrongful Convictions at NU’s School of Law, said that he didn’t think the new proposals would be found constitutional.
“There are now 21 aggravating factors [to give a defendant death] but none of them really mean anything,” he said. “The courts have uniformly held that to get death, you must have been active in the death.”
Warden mentioned some Supreme Court cases, including Coker v. Georgia, which have overturned attempts to expand the death penalty to non-murder cases. He said that proposals that tried to make child molesters or accomplices eligible for the death penalty would be quickly found unconstitutional.
However, the costs involved with all death-penalty appeals cost taxpayers a lot of money. Each New Jersey death-penalty case, counting appeals and lawyer expenses, costs an average of $4.2 million of tax money. Now consider that to reach the Supreme Court, the case would have to be appealed on several levels, each one costing more than the last. In the end, a child molester trying to appeal a death sentence to the Supreme Court will cost taxpayers millions of dollars.
Even more than the costs, Warden said we should think about how unjust the death penalty is. In the ruling in Furman v. Georgia, Thurgood Marshall said that if the American people really understood the realities of the death penalty, they would demand that it be abolished.
“Whatever he thought was wrong, it’s more apparent today under the laws enacted since 1972,” Warden said. “At some point the [descendants] of the people who are proponing this will be as ashamed of this as we are of our ancestors for condoning slavery.”
These new proposals are setting up bitter court battles over the death penalty at a time when it was already in flux. It’s not ridiculous to think that we could be heading towards the final decision on the death penalty in the United States.