Since 1976, the year the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed the constitutionality of the death penalty, thirty-eight states have adopted death penalty statutes, and thirty-two of them have actually carried out executions. Polls show that most Americans favor the death penalty, at least in theory, even if they don’t trust the system through which it is administered. In a May 2002 Gallop Poll, 69 percent of the respondents said they favored capital punishment, but 73 percent of the respondents said that they believed at least one innocent person had been put to death in the previous five years.
In January of 2003 (after this book was written), the Republican governor of Illinois, George Ryan, commuted the sentences of all 167 people on death row in his state. “Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error,” he declared, “error in determin-ing guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.” Among the problems he cited were racially motivated prosecutions, coerced confessions, district attorneys and judges subject to popular election, and unreliable witnesses-problems discussed in this novel; my previous work, Death Row; and other books in the Ben Kincaid series.
In the spring of 2000, a team of criminologists at Columbia University released the first phase of the most far-reaching study yet of the U.S. death penalty system. It showed that the system was riddled with unfairness and incompetence, with serious errors arising with alarming frequency at every stage of the process. The study also showed that of every three death sentences reviewed, two were overturned on appeal. No one knew what percentage of the remaining cases were tainted-until science provided us with a heretofore-unknown method for assessing guilt.
In recent years, DNA evidence has called many of those verdicts into question, but there is still no law in any state guaranteeing a defendant DNA testing or the right to an appeal based upon newly discovered DNA evidence. As of this writing, more than one hundred people on death row have had their convictions overturned because DNA or other scientific evidence provided irrefutable proof of their innocence. If these figures are typical of the national rate of wrongful conviction, that would mean that one in eight of the prisoners now on death row are not guilty of the crimes for which they were convicted.
– William Bernhardt
October 2003