Return to Resources

Death Penalty Unfairly Applied

by James E. Bowley
Planet Weekly Guest Writer

There are currently 69 persons on death row in Mississippi. We, as citizens of this state, have decided to kill them all. We have decided to kill them despite the fact that the death penalty is not equitably administered. There are dozens of national statistics to corroborate this; here are a few: If you are poor or happen to commit your crime in certain counties of certain states, your chances of getting the death penalty are much higher than if you are rich or live in certain other counties.

Here in Mississippi, there are staggering differences between various counties within the same state, supposedly governed by the same laws. If you murder a white person in the U.S., you are much more likely to get the death penalty than if you murder an African-American. 81 percent of capital cases involve white victims, though only 50 percent of capital murder victims are white.

The same is true here in Mississippi: according to data from the United States Department of Justice, from 1976 through 2000, 74 percent of the homicide victims in Mississippi were African-American. But of the 220 victims for whom people were sentenced to death in Mississippi from 1976 to the present, 72 percent of them were white.

However, the ultimate injustice is seen when we kill innocent people. Since 1973 in the U.S., 114 persons sentenced to die by a supposedly fair justice system were fully exonerated based late evidence (such as DNA). Imagine how many innocent people were put to death. But we probably didn’t hear about them because they were mostly poor and from places where we don’t mind killing people.

In 2001, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said, “If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.” Some of our leaders think killing a few innocents is okay and have said so publicly. Would this be acceptable if statistics showed that capital punishment resulted in deterrence to crime? In fact, states without capital punishment have lower murder rates than those that have it. States that have recently reinstated capital punishment have seen no decrease from previous murder rates, and many countries without capital punishment have much lower murder rates than the U.S.

Here is what we do. We strap a person to a gurney and wheel him or her into a small stark room where witnesses can watch him or her being killed from behind a window. We, as citizens of this state, watch the killing, and then we go out of the room and tell our children that they should be nice.

In fact, premeditated killing by a state only reinforces the notion that violence is the answer to violence. Our politicians and we say that violence on our streets is the very problem we will stop by killing people! One day a week we might even teach our children not to return evil for evil, to not do to others what we don’t want done to ourselves, to not participate in the cycle of violence. But on the day we strap this person to the gurney to kill him or her, we teach the opposite.

This killing we do is not necessary to protect society. Persons secured in humane prisons do not pose a public danger. In the words of Bishop William Houck, “The truth is that we do not need to resort to executions in order to provide for the safety of our citizens.” All other western industrialized countries have realized this and abolished the death penalty as ineffective and inhumane. The top four countries still using execution are China, the Congo, the United States, and Iran. The supposedly free and humane U.S. is one of only six countries (with Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen) that still executes juvenile criminals. That’s a nice list to be on. Here in Mississippi, we too have decided to kill several juvenile criminals.

For more information on the death penalty visit www.deathpenaltyinfo.org. For local information visit www.mesj.info.

James E. Bowley is on the board of Mississippians Educating for Smart Justice (MESJ). Part Two of this guest editorial will appear in next week’s issue.

From Planet Weekly, June 16, 2004