Death penalty incongruous to flawed legal system

For more than 30 years the Nebraska State Legislature has debated death penalty abolition.


This year's debate, however, takes on new significance after the Nebraska Supreme Court last February struck down the electric chair – Nebraska's only method of execution – as cruel and unusual punishment. Nebraska became a ‘de facto' abolition state, ultimately infuriating our government's most vocal supporters for state-sponsored murder, Gov. Dave Heineman, Attorney General Jon Bruning and Senate Speaker Mike Flood.


Unlike prior years, senators this session will both debate the death penalty repeal and a new form of execution. The opening shots of the debate begin tomorrow when the Judiciary Committee simultaneously hears two competing bills – Senator Brenda Council's LB306 to repeal the death penalty and replace it with life imprisonment without parole and Flood's LB36 to implement lethal injection.


If this year's debate is anything like the debates I observed the past two years – when senators narrowly failed to pass a repeal bill – many pro-death penalty senators will continue to ignore capital punishment's propensity for errors, sidestep its immorality and instead fear monger instead about murderers.


And if it weren't for the fact that our state senators literally wield the power of life and death, it would be amusing to watch death penalty advocates in the Senate contort themselves to defend state-sponsored killing in ways that ignore reality.


Take Sen. Tony Fulton, for example. Although our prison system today safely keeps the most dangerous criminals away from the public, Fulton wants you to fear otherwise. Last session he warned of possible ‘hit jobs' ordered from prison escapees running amok. I don't mean to be facetious, but Fulton appears to base his justification for executions off of Sopranos episodes rather than the actual record of the Nebraska Department of Corrections.


Pro-death penalty senators tend to advocate capital punishment for what they term the worst or most heinous murderers, conjuring to memory particularly violent crimes. But terms such as ‘worst' and ‘heinous' are profoundly subjective – some brutal murders result only in life or terminal sentences, while the vast majority of death penalty-eligible crimes do not receive death sentences. The result is that capital punishment's application is extraordinarily arbitrary.


According to Amnesty International, only two percent of convictions for death-penalty eligible crimes actually receive death sentences. This bears out in Nebraska where more than 1,000 murders have occurred since capital punishment has been reinstated, but only 31 people have been sentenced to death row. Only three have been executed, while 13 others had sentences commuted to life and four died in jail. Presently ten sit on death row.


Senators also speak of capital punishment's alleged deterrence factor. Yet a comparison of murder rates in states with and without death penalties actually shows that fewer murders occur in states without capital execution. This isn't to suggest fewer murders occur without a death penalty, but rather that the penalty has no significant deterring effect. Moreover, national surveys of law enforcement officials actually agree, placing the death penalty as one of its least effective crime deterrence tools.


When I listened to senators debate capital punishment last March, perhaps most puzzling were those of the Catholic faith, like Sen. Tom White, who proclaimed that his faith instructs him that killing of any kind is wrong, but defended the death penalty and voted against abolition. The Vatican has been outspoken against the death penalty, arguing it's "not only a refusal of the right to life, but it is also an affront to human dignity," a rejection of Gospel teachings of forgiveness, and it promotes a culture of death and violent revenge rather than true justice. Recognizing the danger of executing innocent people, the Vatican supports worldwide abolition.


But often the debate comes down to justice for victims. But we must remember that countless people are caught up in a flawed justice system and they and their families are victims, too.


Since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 130 death row inmates have been exonerated. The Innocence Project reports that DNA testing exonerated 223 prisoners for major crimes. Those wrongly-imprisoned served an average of 12 years before their clemency.


Last November I wrote about how DNA evidence exonerated the ‘Beatrice Six' in the murder of Helen Wilson in 1986. Those six spent a collective 70 years in jail. That injustice was even more shocking after Bruning admitted that investigators used the threat of the death sentence to coerce the suspects into false confessions.


That case raised irrefutable questions about capital punishment's legitimacy – whether we can morally afford to maintain a form of punishment that is error-prone, susceptible to abuse and, most importantly, irreversible if carried out.

The fact is that local politics, the location of a crime, a person's gender, race, ethnicity and socioeconomic background, as well as their opportunities to plea bargain, all determine whether or not someone receives a death sentence or receives adequate court representation. People from lower-incomes and racial minorities are most likely to receive poor representation and death sentences.


The rise in exonerations, the doubts over fairness and the propensity toward errors has shifted the momentum in the death penalty debate toward abolition and narrowed its acceptable uses in recent years. It's only recently become unconstitutional to execute the mentally ill and minors. Yet our country remains a world leader in state executions.


Nebraska state senators should honor justice for all innocents by rejecting lethal injection and abolishing the death penalty in favor of life imprisonment without parole.


Nic Swiercek is a Graduate History Student. Reach him at opinion@dailynebraskan.com.