David Dow went from a death penalty supporter to founding the Texas Innocence Network and running a death penalty clinic. He has since written a number of books, including Executed on a Technicality.
This week on Everyday Injustice, David Dow explains the various injustices within the death penalty system.
As he writes in his book, “I simply conclude that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed.”
Instead of punishing the worst of the worst, he found, “The ultimate penalty was being consistently applied in a wrongful and arbitrary fashion.”
Moreover, the system was making a tremendous number of errors.
“According to Professor James Liebman’s definitive study of all death penalty cases from 1976 though 1995,13 death row inmates prevailed on their appeals in federal court more than half the time. That is a stunning statistic that bears repeating: In half of all death penalty cases over a twenty-year period, a federal court reversed either the conviction or the sentence or both. In no other area of law are reversals the norm.”
That changed with the passage of the 1994 Death Penalty law—which made appeals much more difficult to sustain, but did not end the problems.
