Today, the person most likely to be executed in America is a poor minority, represented by a public defender, convicted of killing a Caucasian in the South. It is impossible to separate this reality from its historic context.
Even worse, as George Will noted in 2000, the actual administration of capital sentencing in our judicial system “is a catalog of appalling miscarriages of justice, some of them nearly lethal. Their cumulative weight compels the conclusion that many innocent people are in prison, and innocent people have been executed.” As a result, in the words of Baptist theologian David Gushee, “the death penalty is a public policy that fails the most basic standards of justice.”
Capital punishment also separates America from other Western democracies, the vast majority of which have abandoned the practice. Indeed, according to Amnesty International, today “more than two thirds of the countries in the world have abolished the death penalty in law or practice.” Globally, there is now a strong correlation between capital punishment and totalitarianism. The United States annually ranks among the world’s leaders in executions along with nations like China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Yemen, and Syria. Such is the company we keep.
Source: The Register Citizen, Michael Stafford, Sept. 14, 2011
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