State Representative
As a co-sponsor of two recent death penalty bills, I want to inform you of the inequities of the death penalty in Missouri.
Preliminary findings from a study conducted by professors at the Saint Louis University School of Law indicate that prosecutorial discretion accounts for a large percentage of whether or not a person has the possibility of receiving the death penalty.
The data also suggest that there are large disparities across counties in the way local prosecutors exercise this discretion. This means that if someone committed a homicide in St. Louis County, he or she could get a completely different sentence than if he or she committed the same homicide a few miles away in a different county, due to prosecutorial discretion.
This also means that the same prosecutor could charge two different individuals in the same county with first-degree murder (with the same mitigating factors present), but one may be death penalty-eligible and the other may not.
How is this just?
While I am personally against the death penalty as a form of punishment, I believe our system should impose penalties fairly. The system is renowned for its unequal treatment of people. Prosecutors have much control, but other factors also influence the judicial system.
Race, in particular, should not be a factor in whether a person receives the death penalty or gets life without parole, but studies show that it repeatedly does make a difference. Someone’s life could hang in the balance because of his or her race.
It is also well documented that many innocent people who are put to death by the state are later exonerated through DNA or other evidence. In St. Louis, prosecutor Jennifer Joyce reopened the Larry Griffin case in 2005 when serious doubt was raised as to his guilt. Though Griffin has not been exonerated yet, Joyce felt there was enough evidence to warrant a reinvestigation 24 years after Griffin’s conviction.
Since 1973, 123 death row inmates have been released nationwide because new evidence emerged. Three of those people were exonerated in Missouri. This system is far from perfect, and we cannot take chances with people’s lives. This is not about being hard or soft on crime. It is about ensuring that our justice system is as fair and accurate as possible.
House Bill 258 abolishes the death penalty in Missouri. House Bill 445 establishes a Commission on the Death Penalty to look at the penalty process in Missouri. The commission will make recommendations about improving current procedures to ensure that people who are sentenced to death are in fact guilty of first-degree murder, that defendants are provided adequate counsel at all levels of representation, that race does not play an impermissible role in determining who receives the death sentence, and that
prosecutors throughout the state seek the death penalty in a uniform manner.
Although this bill does not abolish the death penalty, it puts a moratorium on the death penalty until 2011. I feel that this bill will help us set up a system that is better at securing justice than the current system. We can only do that through a thorough investigation of the process and also by creating a way to insure that individual rights are protected.
These are just a few reasons why we should be outraged about the death penalty in Missouri. After looking at prosecutorial discretion, racial discrimination and innocent people being executed, what’s left in this picture? What could possibly outweigh these risks? Neither ideology nor vindication matter when we are dealing with human lives.
The death penalty is not just. It is not civilized. Other states have recognized this inherent flaw in our judicial system. We have the same choice in
Missouri.
For more information on the Missouri study, visit
http://law.slu.edu/conf/deathpenalty/index.html. To track the bill, visit
www.house.mo.gov/jointsearch/.
Carol’s Journal by Carol Daniel will return next week.