Erstellt am: 11. 10. 2014 - 00:16 Uhr

Why the State Shouldn’t Kill

An American journalist's perspective on the death penalty.

Text: Peter Rooney

Peter Rooney

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Saturday, October 11th, 12-13, and after that seven days on demand.

Here's the thing about the death penalty: Whether by guillotine, noose, firing squad, gas chamber, electric chair or lethal injection, societies have used as many methods to execute their citizens as there have been arguments against the ultimate punishment.

Here's the thing about human nature: Arguments about the death penalty's cruelty and inhumanity will always fail to persuade those who believe that some crimes are so vile that death really is the only appropriate punishment to deal with them.

When I was a teenager growing up in Illinois outside of Chicago, John Wayne Gacy was arrested for killing 33 young men and boys. The TV news showed police bringing one body after another out of the basement of his tidy suburban home. People were horrified and angry that crimes so evil had been committed practically under their noses. Many believed Gacy deserved to die for his terrible crimes, and I was one of them.

Miscarriage of justice

Flash-forward to 1994 and another case. I was a young reporter who had uncovered and written about alarming evidence that Joseph Burrows had been convicted and sentenced to die for a murder he didn't commit.

Peter Rooney

Joseph Burrows, who was wrongly convicted of murder and held on death row for five years. As a young reporter Peter Rooney uncovered evidence which helped exonerate him.

In May of that year, Gacy, whose jail cell was not far from Burrows', was strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection of chemicals. Although there were other inmates who had been on Death Row longer, Gacy was the first person executed against his will in Illinois since 1962, ushering in a new era of executions in the state.

Outside the prison that day, several hundred people raucously cheered his death. Some of them held signs that said "Gacy Go To Hell," while a handful of death penalty opponents stood vigil with lit candles, bearing silent witness to what they believed was state-sanctioned murder.

- public domain - California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

If Gacy had become a poster boy for the death penalty for those who supported capital punishment, other executions that followed were more problematic. Gervies Davis, a 37-year old black man convicted of murder by an all-white jury, claimed until the end that he had committed some armed robberies but had never killed anyone. He could barely read or write, but he had signed a detailed, handwritten statement that he said had been prepared by police. A group of journalism students researched the facts of his case in the weeks leading up to his scheduled execution and campaigned for a stay of execution. Their claims that Davis was probably innocent of murder were to no avail. Like Gacy before him, Davis was killed by lethal injection.

In September 1994, Joe Burrows was released after spending more than five years of his life on death row. The woman who first accused Burrows of murdering an elderly farmer now confessed she had done it herself. Burrows had not been with her at the scene, and in fact had nothing to do with the crime, she now said.

My own view

Before Burrows asked me to look into his case, and I decided to do just that, I was mostly against the death penalty, with rare exceptions for monsters like Gacy. Burrows and too many other examples of wrongful convictions made me realize you can't be mostly against the death penalty because you can't trust the system to be error-free. And the state killing the innocent is a very serious error indeed.

CC-BY-SA-2.0 / World Coalition Against The Death Penalty

Since 1973, over 140 people in the United States have been released from death rows in 26 states because of innocence. In Illinois, Governor George Ryan first suspended all executions, and then in 2003 commuted the death sentences of 167 prisoners. He was influenced by the fact that, while he was governor, 13 people had been released from death row because new evidence had been uncovered to support their innocence (Ryan was no saint by the way; he ended up serving more than five years in federal prison for corruption). In 2011, Governor Patrick Quinn officially abolished the death penalty in Illinois.

The convicted murderers who had been on death row had their punishments changed to life imprisonment. Life behind bars will never satisfy those who believe vicious murderers should themselves be killed, and the innocent will still be sent to jail. It's still progress, though, and I'm proud to say I played a small role in moving my home state toward rejecting the ultimate punishment.