Death row second thoughts

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"When I was convicted of something I knew did not happen, I stopped and said a quiet prayer," former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman told The Star last week for an article on the death penalty. "I prayed that I had not made the same mistake when I was governor."

Siegelman, who was recently released from federal prison after serving time on corruption charges, isn't the first public official to express doubts about the death penalty after leaving office. Or, in the case of John Paul Stevens, someone on the verge of retiring from public service after a lengthy tenure.

In a 1976 death penalty case, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stevens voted with the majority to reinstate the death penalty. At the time, Stevens wrote that under the proper circumstances, he foresaw "evenhanded, rational and consistent imposition of death sentences under law."

In a 2008 when he was 2 years away from retirement, Stevens described capital punishment as "the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the state (is) patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment."

On the eve of retirement, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun expressed a similar reversal on the death penalty. In a 1994 case, he wrote, "The death-penalty experiment has failed. I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death."

Closer to home, Sam Monk upon his retirement as a Calhoun County circuit court judge in 2006, said of capital punishment that over time he had come "to the conclusion that the process probably dehumanizes everybody to some degree."

Former Texas Gov. Mark White wrote in 2014, "While I still believe that some crimes are so heinous that society is morally justified in demanding the perpetrator's life be forfeited, we now have incontrovertible evidence that America's criminal justice system does a poor job of determining who deserves the death penalty."

Second thoughts like these are a positive sign that these officeholders and others didn't shut down their ability to reason on a controversial topic that's loaded with nuance. After all, many death penalty cases involve brutal crimes carried out by remorseless murderers. A suitable punishment short of death can seem well short of justice.

In a state like Alabama, capital punishment remains popular. Politicians are rarely punished for a pro-death penalty stance. Yet, the process that decides which cases end up on death row and which ones don't is often flawed. A long list of former death row inmates who were exonerated by new evidence speaks to the holes in our criminal justice system. Mistakes made there can be fatal.

Source: The Anniston Star, Editorial Board, October 3, 2017

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

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