EDITORIAL: Death penalty needs to be scrapped

EDITORIAL: No way to save flawed system

   When outgoing Illinois Gov. George Ryan commuted the death sentences of all 157 men on death row in the Midwestern state, he reignited a national debate on capital punishment that we hope will put an end to its practice.
   Gov. Ryan commuted the sentences because of his belief that our system of capital punishment is broken, that it is biased based on race, geography and class. He’s right.
   Studies conducted by a blue-ribbon panel in Illinois and by the University of Maryland have raised serious questions. In Illinois, for instance, the panel found that rural areas of the state were five times more likely to opt for the death penalty than the predominantly urban Cook County. In Maryland, all 12 of the people currently on the state’s death row were convicted and sentenced in connection with the murder of a white victim, while blacks make up about 80 percent of homicide victims. Nationally, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, about 80 percent of those convicted of a capital crime were convicted for killing a white victim, although whites make up only 50 percent of murder victims.
   And according to the American Civil Liberties Union, money also plays a role in the imposition of the death penalty, with poor and indigent suspects not having the resources to hire quality representation.
   These mitigating factors are at least part of the reason why 102 people have been found innocent after being convicted and sentenced to death since 1973 — and why an unknown number of innocents have likely been killed during the same time period.
   It is important to point out, as well, that the United States is one of the few developed countries in the world that still practice capital punishment and only China, Iran and Saudi Arabia execute more prisoners than the United States. That is not great company to be among.
   Altogether, 820 people have been executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1977, with 71 being sent to death in 2002 and 66 being executed in 2001.
   These figures raise serious questions about the ability of our judicial system to fairly and effectively administer so final a punishment, one that cannot be reversed once meted out.
   A good start would be for the U.S. Senate to pass legislation — introduced by Sens. Russ Feingold (D-Wisc.) and Jon Corzine (D-N.J.) that would establish a national commission to study whether it is possible to correct the flaws in the death penalty system to ensure that innocent men and women are not sent to death and would impose a national moratorium on capital punishment until the study is completed.
   Such a study is likely to find what it took retired Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun to conclude: that "the death penalty experiment has failed."
   "It is virtually self-evident to me now that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies," he wrote in his dissenting opinion in Callins v. Callins in 1994. "The basic question — does the system accurately and consistently determine which defendants "deserve" to die? — cannot be answered in the affirmative."
   And given that there is scant evidence demonstrating that capital punishment is an effective deterrent, we see no legitimate legal or moral reason for it to continue.