The Guardian has published another article on the U.S. death penalty. Decca Aitkenhead describes the experience of witnessing a prisoner's death by lethal injection. The article also delves into the reasons behind the reduction in state sanctioned executions in recent years. (For some reason I find it particularly poignant that the budget for a prisoner's last meal has been cut from $50.00 to $15.00.)
What changed everything was the emergence of the innocence movement. In 1998, Northwestern University's law school in Chicago hosted a national conference on wrongful capital convictions. It brought together 31 former death row inmates who had been found innocent and released. One by one, each man stepped forward on stage to introduce himself with the words, 'If the state of such-and-such had had its way, I would not be here today.'
'It was just an extraordinary event,' Dayan recalls. 'People all over America saw this on the evening news. And once exonerations started reaching their consciousness, all of a sudden all the things we'd been talking about for years started to gain traction. When they find out some of the people on death row aren't, in fact, murderers, but innocent people, then they ask how does a wrongful conviction happen? And the answers to that question are: racism, classism, etc - all the things we'd been trying to talk about. Only now, everyone started listening.'
Soon, students at Northwestern had uncovered 13 wrongful capital convictions in Illinois alone. One man had spent 15 years on death row and come within two days of being executed before the students found evidence that proved his innocence. By 2000, the state of Illinois had exonerated more death row inmates than it had executed, at which point its governor - a Republican and long-time death penalty supporter - declared a moratorium.
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