Human error still undermines a death penalty designed around sound evidence, said two officials from Northwestern School of Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions.
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney introduced a bill Thursday that would reinstate the state’s death penalty under rigorous scientific safeguards. The bill requires conclusive evidence, such as fingerprints or DNA, to convict suspects in cases of terrorism, assassinations of law enforcement officials and multiple killings.
But officials at the center said they doubt the bill is flawless, despite attempts to build safeguards into a revised death penalty system.
“No system based on human judgment can ever be perfect,” said Robert Warden, executive director of the center. “Human judgment is, by default, fallible.”
Massachusetts outlawed capital punishment in 1984. In 2003, Romney appointed a panel to design a death penalty that used scientific advances to ensure foolproof evidence.
“In the past, efforts to reinstate the death penalty in Massachusetts have failed,” said Romney in a press release. “They have failed because of concerns that it would be too broadly applied or that evidentiary standards weren’t high enough or proper safeguards weren’t in place. We have answered all those concerns with this bill.”
Warden said the bill would make mistakes less likely, but not impossible. Scientific evidence can be faulty, he said.
In one instance a person’s stolen jacket contained the blood of a murder victim, and the owner of the coat was wrongfully convicted, Warden said.
Edwin Colfax, director of the center’s Death Penalty Education Project, said it wouldn’t be too hard for someone to plant scientific evidence. Police misconduct at the crime scene can still produce faulty evidence, he said.
“No matter how good the architecture of the new death penalty is, there are certain pitfalls in the system that can’t be legislated away,” Colfax said.
Romney is proposing the bill in a state that has not executed anyone in more than 50 years.
“The huge hole in this effort is that there is no compelling reason,” Colfax said.
The bill would be more useful in one of the 38 states that currently use capital punishment, Warden said.
“It contains some concepts that states with the death penalty on the books would do well to emulate,” he said.
Warden and Colfax agreed that some of the bill’s ideas would reduce doubtful convictions.
Romney’s proposed bill also would provide two juries for murder suspects, one for the trial and one for the sentencing.
In the current one-jury system, prospective jurors are asked if they have any moral qualms about issuing a death sentence. If they do, they are dismissed. This makes juries more “conviction-prone,” Warden said.
If two juries were used, the trial jury would not have to have to be “death qualified,” Warden said.
“It would represent an improvement, but none of these things are magic bullets,” Colfax said.
The Center on Wrongful Convictions is dedicated to correcting wrongful convictions and obstructions of justice. It represents prisoners, researches flaws in the criminal justice system and raises public awareness about injustice.
The center has been involved with exonerating 30 inmates, 11 of them from death row.
Human safeguards are still important, Colfax said.
“We provide legal assistance to inmates with meritorious claims to innocence, free of charge,” Colfax said. “We will always have work to do.”
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