Since 1973, at least 202 innocent people have been freed from death row after evidence revealed they were wrongfully convicted. That’s almost one person exonerated for every ten who’ve been executed. What’s more, there is strong evidence that we have executed at least 20 innocent people in the United States.
Wrongful convictions rob innocent people of decades of their lives, waste tax dollars, and re-traumatize the victim’s family – all while the people truly responsible for these heinous crimes remain unaccountable.
When a life is on the line, one mistake is one too many. Are we willing to take that risk?
What we’ve learned in the DNA era
- Hundreds of DNA exonerations reveal that murder cases are often riddled with errors: mistaken eyewitnesses, bad lawyers, shoddy forensics, unreliable jailhouse snitches, coerced confessions, and more.
- DNA cannot solve these problems – it can only tell us how bad they are. DNA evidence exists in just 5-10% of criminal cases.
- In those few cases where DNA evidence is available, courts can block access to DNA testing even when it could exonerate someone.
- Evidence is only as good as the people doing the testing – and crime labs across the country have come under fire for errors and even fraud in their forensics, and new evidence may not even surface until years after the original conviction.
Despite the best intentions, we can’t get it right 100% of the time
- The risk of executing an innocent person is not limited to cases of incompetence or corruption. Despite our best efforts, human beings are imperfect. In a capital murder case, even one small mistake can be deadly.
- Contrary to popular belief, the appeals process is not designed to catch cases of innocence. It is simply to determine whether the original trial was conducted properly. Most exonerations are achieved only because of the extraordinary efforts of people working outside the system, like pro bono lawyers and family members.
- Any efforts to streamline the death penalty process or cut appeals only increase the risk of a wrongful execution.
- A comprehensive death penalty study by the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment recommended 85 reforms to decrease the risk of wrongful execution. Not a single state has even a majority of those reforms in place.
The death penalty is the ultimate form of government authority, granting the power with the irreversible decision to end a human life. This level of authority raises serious concerns about government overreach and the need for strict responsibility, since any error is final and beyond correction once carried out. When the government both prosecutes and carries out a sentence, mistakes can result in permanent consequences with limited accountability.
The wrong man: Stories of a broken system
- Glynn Simmons is the longest serving wrongful conviction exoneree in the United States, having served 48 years in prison in Oklahoma for a crime he did not commit. No physical evidence ever connected him to the crime. The only “evidence” against him was grossly falsified police line-ups and reports and police manipulation of a victim who briefly witnessed the crime before being horribly injured during it. He was exonerated and released from prison in 2023. The following year, he reached a partial settlement of $7.15 million in a civil rights lawsuit.
- Frank Lee Smith was sentenced to death in Florida in 1986 on the testimony of a single witness. No physical evidence tied him to the crime – the rape and murder of eight-year-old Shandra Whitehead. Four years later, the same witness saw a photo of a different man and realized she made a mistake. DNA tests later confirmed Smith’s innocence, but it was too late. He died in prison of pancreatic cancer. He was officially exonerated eleven months after his death.
- Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in Texas in 2004 for setting fire to his home, killing his three children. Experts now say that the arson theories used in the investigation are scientifically invalid. Willingham may very well have been executed for an accidental fire.
- Gary Gauger was sentenced to die in Illinois in 1994 for the murder of his parents. Police questioned him for 18 hours, depriving him of sleep, food, and water. An unrelated investigation later uncovered the people who actually committed the crime, and Gauger was exonerated.
- Kirk Bloodsworth, a U.S. Marine veteran, was sentenced to death in 1985 for the murder of nine-year-old Dawn Hamilton in Maryland. He maintained his innocence from the beginning. When he was granted a new trial, prosecutors withheld evidence – leading to a second conviction. While on death row, Bloodsworth learned of a new innovation in genetic fingerprinting. He persuaded his lawyer to pursue it and after nine years in prison, Kirk Bloodsworth became the first death row inmate exonerated by DNA.
- Ray Krone was sentenced to death in Arizona in 1992 for the for rape and murder for the murder of Kim Anconda, even though DNA found on the victim did not match him. The state argued against having the DNA submitted to the database since the jury found him guilty even without physical evidence. A decade later, a crime lab worker ran the DNA through a database on his own, without a court order, and uncovered the identity of the person who actually committed the crime.
Additional Reading:
Witness to Innocence: About innocence
Death Penalty Information Center: Innocence
Vanderbilt University: Lessons Learned from Wrongful Convictions in a Death Penalty State
