Capital Punishment - Execute Cannot Be Pardoned - Research Paper Example

The Death Penalty Information Center keeps an "Innocence List" which names incarcerated people who have been exonerated since 1973. There are 119 to date. Many people also agree there are a percentage of inmates that are actually innocent who are in death row. People can receive wrongful convictions be in death row for many reasons: inadequate legal representation, police and prosecutorial misconduct, perjured testimony and mistaken eyewitness testimony, racial prejudice, jailhouse snitch testimony, suppression and/or misinterpretation of mitigating evidence, and community/political pressure to solve a case.

Faulty eyewitness identifications, false testimony, police prejudice against people of color and lower class citizens are not strong evidence to send someone to death row. According to Ernest Van Den Haag (1983) “capital punishments is irreversible. No one can return the years spent in prison to a person who had been wrongfully imprisoned”. Because of these aforementioned errors, lives had been claimed instead of being rehabilitated. There are factors contributory to the lapses of applying capital punishment.

Sadly, one of the main reasons why prisoners are given the death penalty is the fact that they have ineffective lawyers. According to Richard Dieter, former Executive Director of Death Penalty Information Center “ Far too often, people are given the death penalty not for committing the worst crimes, but for having the worst lawyers”. This is what makes death penalty unfair for people are not served by the law well. The law kills instead of protecting people and valuing human life.

  In 1998, the Dallas Morning News reported a case that tragically illustrates the effect of ineffective counsels on the lives of their clients: Death row inmates Laroyce Smith and Paul Richard Colella have also been punished for their attorneys' missteps. Their lawyers, who were appointed by the Court of Criminal Appeals, missed statutory deadlines for filing certain documents. They made mistakes. But rather than appoint new lawyers who could meet deadlines, the court simply refused to consider the late applications.