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| Aubrey Harris |
In 2004, Texas executed Cameron Todd Willingham, a poor, uneducated white man, despite knowing that the key “forensic” evidence used to convict him was fatally flawed pseudoscience. Willingham had been convicted of arson in a fire that killed his three children. International experts wrote to then-governor Rick Perry, making clear that the claims of investigator Manuel Vasquez and high-school-educated fire chief Douglas Fogg relied on long-debunked “junk science” theories. The fire was, by expert opinion, an accident. Years later, Texas opened a commission on the use of forensic science in trials that was suddenly disbanded when it was clear they were about to officially find that the evidence against Willingham was unreliable.
On Jan. 13, 2021, at the end of a lifetime of severe sexual abuse and mental illness, Lisa Montgomery was executed during President Trump’s end of term and unprecedented federal execution spree, rubber-stamped by the SCOTUS. Montgomery was the first woman federally executed in almost 70 years. Growing up under extreme sexual abuse, Montgomery experienced severe mental illness that caused intense delusions. In a dissenting opinion Justice Sonia Sotomayor found Montgomery had met a “substantial threshold showing” that she was incompetent to be executed under the U.S. Constitution.
In 2005 then-governor of California Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, co-founder of the Cripps gang, who had since his conviction turned his life around to warn children of the dangers of the gang lifestyle and sought to end gang violence. The execution took place despite Williams having turned his life around and making efforts to prevent others falling into the same life he had. Again, this execution sparked international outcry.
These are just examples of some of the problems in the way the death penalty is carried out in the United States.
The U.S.-based Death Penalty Information Center notes that one of the highest predictors of a death sentence and execution is the race of the victim. Seventy-five per cent of executions since 1976 have been for the murder of a white person when white victims only make up about 50 per cent of all homicides in the U.S. UN human rights experts note that globally, “if you are poor, the chances of being sentenced to death are immensely higher than if you are rich.”
On average, four wrongly convicted death row prisoners have been exonerated each year since 1973, and it is estimated that if all death-sentenced defendants remained under sentence of death indefinitely, at least 4.1 per cent would be exonerated — or about one in 25.
At least 43 per cent of those on death row suffer from mental illness, though the number may well be much higher.
Executions also fail to deter crime. Like jurisdictions without the death penalty typically have lower per-capita homicide rates. Where the death penalty is abolished, there is no rise in murder rates.
So it is that every execution, no matter the nature of the crime, the characteristics of the offender, or the victim or the method of execution, contributes to sustaining a system that is proven to be costly, ineffective, and targets the poor, racial minorities and the mentally ill. Carrying out any execution feeds injustice. It is therefore so important that even though the news is most welcome that President Biden has commuted the death sentences of 37 men from federal death row, the fact that any people remain at risk of execution — and very likely execution under Donald Trump — fails to uphold the fundamental human right that we all have the right to live; that no person can “deserve” to die.
In the remaining time before he leaves office, President Biden must commute all remaining death sentences from both the U.S. federal and military death rows and not provide fuel to sustain this flawed, racist and unjust system. In 2019 Biden promised to pass legislation to “to eliminate the death penalty at the federal level, and incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” Such a promise must apply to all.
Aubrey Harris is the co-ordinator in the Amnesty International Campaign to Abolish the Death Penalty, Canadian Section (English-Speaking Branch). He can be reached at dpacoordinator@amnesty.ca.
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