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There is a lot of misleading death penalty mythology floating around after today’s news about the restart of federal executions. Let’s set the record straight and look at some facts about capital punishment:
Each state has its own legal system. Some states have a death penalty and others do not. The federal government also has its own legal system. People can be criminally charged in federal courts with breaking federal laws. The death penalty is legal in the federal system.
Right now, there are approximately 2,600 people on death rows across the United States. 61 of those people are on the federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana. It’s those 61 people who are impacted by today’s announcement.
The federal death penalty system was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. Many states quickly enacted new death penalty statutes and executions resumed in 1977. The federal government did not pass new death penalty laws until 1988 and those laws were very narrow.
The Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 expanded the number of death-eligible crimes to almost 60, going way beyond the number of eligible crimes in most states. Some of the federal death-eligible crimes include treason, espionage, and even “wrecking a train.”
The federal death penalty has proved to be very controversial, especially when federal prosecutors pursue an execution in a state where capital punishment was abolished. They can do this under current laws because of the separate federal and state legal systems.
Native American tribal governments are able to decide for themselves whether they want the federal death penalty to be part of their legal systems. Almost every tribe has opted out of using the federal death penalty.
One death-eligible federal crime is murder committed in connection with drug trafficking. The vast majority (over 75%) of people convicted under this law were white. Only 11% of white defendants got a death sentence. 78% of black defendants got death under the same law.
Before a federal prosecutor is allowed to pursue the death penalty in a case, they must get personal written authorization from the U.S. Attorney General. The AG gets the last call on whether to go after the death penalty in the federal system.
The death penalty does not deter crime. 88% of surveyed criminologists agree. In fact, murder rates are higher in states that actively execute people. The death penalty, if anything, might encourage crime through the government’s example of using violence to solve problems.
The U.S. Supreme Court says that only the “worst of the worst” crimes should qualify for the death penalty but no one knows what that means. In reality, it’s factors like race, geography, and the skill of defense lawyers that decide whether someone lives or dies. It’s arbitrary.
166 innocent people have been freed from death rows across the United States after it turned out that they were completely innocent. For every nine executions, one person is exonerated. Legal scholars believe that at least 4% of people on death row are innocent.
People living with mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities are executed on a semi-regular basis. A few years ago, Missouri executed a man who literally had a hole in his brain. Many other states ignore or hide mental health concerns.
The race of a murder victim is a major factor in death sentencing. Here’s a quote from a federal government review done in 1990: “In 82% of the studies reviewed ... those who murdered whites were found more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murdered blacks.”
In a study done in 2000, people of color accounted for around 25% of the total U.S. population but the majority of the death row population. This is especially pronounced in some geographic pockets of the country.
In states that have the death penalty on the books, 94.5% of elected prosecutors are white. In nine of these death penalty states, every single elected prosecutor is white.
To summarize – the death penalty is error-prone, it’s racially biased in several different ways, it’s arbitrary, it targets vulnerable people living with mental illnesses or intellectual disabilities, and it doesn’t deter crime. This is a failed public policy.
