New York's death penalty -
Did you know?
There are compelling concerns about unfairness and wastefulness in New York's death penalty. The Court of Appeals gave New Yorkers an unprecedented opportunity to look at our state's 10-year death penalty experiment and decide whether we really want it back. We've learned a lot in that time. Consider the facts:
Risk of executing an innocent person
• Nationally, at least 123 innocent people have been exonerated from death row – about one for every eight executed, or an error rate of more than 10% in the most scrutinized and careful corner of the criminal justice system
• New York has sent many innocent people to prison for serious crimes they did not commit. Bobby McLaughlin, an innocent man convicted of murder in New York and sentenced to life in prison, put it most powerfully when he said: “If there was a death penalty in New York [when I was convicted], I would now be ashes in an urn in my parents’ living room.” In the past 2 ˝ years, at least 9 men sentenced to long prison terms in New York State have had their convictions overturned with conclusive evidence of their innocence. They are: Alan Newton - rape, robbery, assault, served 21 years; Scott Fappiano - rape, sodomy, burglary, sexual abuse, 21 years; Olmedo Hidalgo – murder, 14 years; John Restivo, John Kogut, Dennis Halstead - murder, rape, 17 years; Barry Gibbs - murder, 19 years; Jeff Deskovic – murder, 16 years; Douglas Warney – murder, 10 years. The purpose of the appellate process is to determine whether a defendant’s trial was fair and in accord with constitutional standards. It is not intended to independently rule on guilt or innocence. The exoneration of these men was possible only because of efforts of people working outside the appeals system. The Innocence Project gets thousands of requests for help each year and is only able to respond to a few of them.
• Commissions in both Illinois and Massachusetts studied the death penalty and made dozens of recommendations to reduce the risk of executing the innocent. The Illinois Commission added that even if all 85 of its recommendations were put in place, the risk would not be eliminated completely. Yet New York has not incorporated most of these reforms into its criminal justice system.
Why Family Members ask legislatures to get rid of the death penalty
• “I’m here to tell you, as the mother of a homicide victim, that the death penalty brings as much pain as it does relief, that it creates an entirely new layer of pain, and that many survivors of homicide victims would prefer that the offender in their case spend a lifetime of unimaginably painful confinement before dying a lonely and often painful death behind bars. And then still face whatever comes next.”
(Janice Greishaber, testimony before the NYS Assembly Codes Committee, Dec. 12, 2005)
• “Nearly eight years since the jury delivered the verdict of death, I am still forced to focus on my mother’s killer. If the killer were given life without parole, and I mean a true life sentence, I would not be here. I would not be forced to discuss the killer and the verdict and the ways in which my life has been affected. Each court date, each appeal, each write-up in the newspaper, revisiting and revisiting the pain, each event keeping me that much further from the curative process I and my family so greatly deserve. If I were asked to speculate what the difference would be in my life, I would say I would be eight years further in my healing process”
(Sandra Place, testimonbefore New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission, Sept. 13, 2006)
Racial and geographic bias
• In New York, those accused of murdering white victims are more than twice as likely to face the death penalty as those who murder black victims, according to a recent study by the Center for Law and Justice in Albany.
• The law doesn’t apply equally to all New Yorkers. More than half of the state’s death sentences sought in the last ten years come from just six counties.
New Yorkers' preference: Life without the possibility of parole
• Asked if people convicted of murder should face the death penalty or life in prison with no chance of parole, 29% said that they favor the death penalty, while 50% said that they favor life in prison without parole, a September 2006 New York Times-CBS poll found. These numbers are fully consistent with data from polls done over the last 3 years.
• Support for the death penalty in New York has dropped approximately 20% since the early 1990s. Even when no alternatives are offered, death penalty support in New York is among the lowest in the nation.
• When New York's death penalty statute was enacted, our state did not have life without the possibility of parole on the books. Now that such an option is available, the death penalty is not needed to keep those convicted of murder off the streets for good.
• Hundreds of organizations across New York have called for a moratorium on executions while the system's many problems are examined. The “quick fix” passed by the Senate does nothing to address the death penalty's flaws.
Expensive and inefficient
• Since New York reinstated the death penalty in 1995, New York taxpayers have spent at least $200 million pursuing capital cases without a single execution taking place.
• Most state studies have found that a system of life without parole is significantly cheaper than the death penalty system, even when including the costs of long-term imprisonment. The death penalty's cost diverts resources from other areas, including crime prevention and victims' services.
• Yet the death penalty is not a deterrent. In Rochester, for example, where prosecutors have sought the death penalty a number of times, the crime rate continued to go up until finally a program called Project IMPACT cut crime by a third in just one year – for a small fraction of the cost. Meanwhile, the crime rate in Manhattan, where the death penalty has never been sought, has been declining since 1991 – four years before the death penalty was reinstated.