Death sentences and executions at the state level are at historic lows. But last week, the federal government took a huge step backward when Attorney General William Barr announced plans to carry out federal executions for the first time since 2003. This decision runs counter to the growing movement at the state level to abolish or suspend the death penalty, reflected by recent efforts in New Hampshire, Washington, and California.
As I wrote in The Hill this weekend, consider the following:
164 innocent people in the United States have been exonerated after being sentenced to death since 1973 (Death Penalty Information Center). Twenty of those people were exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing.
According to a recent study, at least 4% of all defendants sentenced to death in the United States are innocent (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
More than half the people on federal death row in the United States are people of color (Death Penalty Information Center).
In 2018, the Washington State Supreme Court unanimously struck down the state’s death penalty as unconstitutional and “racially biased.”
There are human beings behind this data. As long as our criminal justice system allows innocent people to end up on death row, the federal government should reverse this policy and instead focus on reforms to prevent wrongful conviction. We’re ready to be on the front lines of this fight, but we’ll need your support.
Started in 1992 as a legal clinic at Cardozo School of Law, the Innocence Project is now an independent nonprofit, affiliated with Cardozo, that exonerates the wrongly convicted through DNA testing and reforms the criminal justice system to prevent future injustice. www.innocenceproject.org
