The game of murder

When the largest lawyer’s organization questions the justness of the justice system, we’ve got a problem.\nOn Monday, the American Bar Association called for a nationwide freeze on executions. A three-year review of capital punishment in eight states, including Indiana, revealed serious problems in the justice system that compromise fairness and accuracy in cases involving the death penalty. The study examined 12 factors, including collection and preservation of DNA evidence, interrogation procedures, crime lab conditions, jury selection and instruction, availability and quality of defense services and racial disparities in capital punishment.\nStephon Hanlon, the chair of the ABA committee that conducted the review said, “After carefully studying the way states across the spectrum handle executions, it has become crystal clear that the process is deeply flawed.” With regards to capital punishment, he described our justice system as “rife with irregularity.”\nThe flaws and irregularities include misidentification by eyewitnesses and under-funded crime labs that don’t require accreditation. DNA evidence is occasionally mishandled or discarded. Most states in the review failed to provide written jury instructions or thorough explanation of sentencing options and guidelines. And all states in the study demonstrated significant racial disparities in capital punishment sentences while little, if anything, was being done to investigate or correct the gross disparities.\nUnfortunately, the ABA refuses to take a position on capital punishment, calling only for a freeze on executions while states review their capital punishment procedures. If the evidence of serious flaws in capital punishment isn’t enough to stop executions, then we have a serious moral crisis on our hands. We can’t simply sit back and be cool with the real possibility that a few innocent folks will be murdered by the state. That should throw up some blood-red ethical flags for all of us.\nThe state of Indiana has documented 91 executions since 1897, 19 since the death penalty was restored in Indiana in 1977. Some of those “executions” include mob lynching of blacks accused of sexual misconduct (which probably means a black man looked at a white woman the wrong way). I wonder how many other racially motivated lynchings don’t appear in the record books, even though justice was supposedly being served to innocent people.\nFor me, a moratorium doesn’t go far enough. Even with a hypothetically flawless system, the death penalty amounts to government-sanctioned slaying. It’s not justice but an animalistic impulse for revenge driven by a lynch-mob mentality. Tit-for-tat, murder-for-murder takes us further away from justice and puts us all on par with the mentality of those we seek to punish. This pure vindictiveness and ultimate revenge dehumanizes all of us.\nWe’ve cleaned up the messiness of mob-mentality justice, lynching and the public spectacle of bodies hanging from trees. Instead we have a biased justice system, supposedly “civilized” lethal injections and a secluded death row where those marked for payback are out-of-sight, out-of-mind.\nBut don’t be fooled by the new packaging – it’s the same murderous game that devalues human life. We need to stop playing.