Do not risk committing murder!

Yemen, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, China, Sudan and the United States have something in common. They are all countries that kill their own people. Every country mentioned currently allows its citizens to be sentenced to death.

I cannot speak for the other countries, but in the United States we say we have the death penalty to deter, and ultimately reduce, crime, but does it really work. There is no evidence suggesting that increasing executions leads to a reduction in crime. In fact, as executions increased in the late '80s, the number of crime rose along with them. Similarly, both the number of crimes and the number of executions have decreased in the past decade. If anything, the evidence concludes that increasing executions might actually correlate with higher crime. It leads you to ask does the death penalty accomplish anything other than death.

Unintended consequences can come with any policy and unintended consequences can come with the death penalty that cannot be undone. Carlos DE Luna, an alleged murderer executed by the state of Texas in 1989 is one of many that were executed only to find out later they were most likely innocent. After his execution substantial evidence was discovered that undermines his conviction.

Texas convicted and executed DE Luna despite the fact that the police and prosecutors knew or should have known that the victim was murdered by a man named Carlos Hernandez, a violent criminal who looked almost exactly like DE Luna. It was common knowledge on the streets of Corpus Christi in 1980 that Carlos Gonzalez Hernandez killed Wanda Lopez and not Carlos DE Luna.

DE Luna had a court appointed attorney that had no criminal experience and not one piece of solid evidence was presented in court against DE Luna. After the execution the local newspaper got a copy of the court transcript and it was discovered that there were ten errors in the trial that would have demanded a new trial. Carlos Gonzalez Hernandez the real murderer died in prison, in 1999, boasting to the end that he had killed Wanda Lopez and allowed another man to take the fall for it.

What happen in the DE Luna trial has happen with other trials and it happens because the criminal justice system decides that the accused criminal is bad enough to be executed without a remotely fair process. The community is fine with the result. The media doesn’t care until it is too late. The DE Luna case and about six others cases that I know of in the United States prove that innocent people have been executed in the United States.

Ex-Governor Rick Perry of Texas criticized the Syrian government for threatening the safety of its own people. The next month, he bragged that he had authorized 234 executions, the most of any governor in history.

At least 4.1% of all defendants sentenced to death in the US in the modern era are thought to have been innocent, according to the first major study to attempt to calculate how often states get it wrong. More than 8000 have been executed in the United States since 1970. Every time we execute someone, there is a risk of executing an innocent person. The risk may be small, but it’s unacceptable.

Some 2,675 people were taken off death row after doubts about their convictions were raised between 1973 and 2004. But, they were then put on new sentences, usually life without parole which means they will almost certainly die in prison. Prosecutors are not anxious to allow new trials even when these errors are pointed out because it is an embarrassment to them to be proved wrong.

You would think when a prisoner is removed from death row that it would be a good thing and in a way it is, but that does not tell the whole story. Once a prisoner is taken off death row and put in general population they no long have the best efforts of the judicial system available to them since that is reserved for prisoners facing execution.

Hundreds of DNA exonerations reveal that murder cases are often riddled with problems: mistaken eyewitnesses, bad lawyers, shoddy forensics, unreliable jailhouse snitches, coerced confessions, and more. DNA evidence exists in only 5-10% of criminal cases.

The FBI announced that experts exaggerated the value of hair analysis in hundreds of cases, 32 of which resulted in a death sentence. Defendants in 9 of those cases have been executed. Finger prints, bite marks, ballistics, and fire pattern analyses have also come under scrutiny.

In cases where DNA evidence is available, courts can block access to testing, even when it could exonerate someone. Furthermore, scientific evidence is only as good as the people testing it. Crime labs from Baltimore to Oklahoma City have come under fire for errors and even fraud in their forensics.

An independent review of the Houston police crime lab found serious problems with DNA and blood-evidence analysis in dozens of criminal cases from 1987 to 2002, including three death penalty cases. 2,700 cases were analyzed by the lab's six forensic departments during that time and 1,100 cases have been reviewed. Nearly 40 percent of the DNA cases and 23 percent of the blood evidence cases were found to have had major problems. The same problem arose in the Houston police Crime lab in 2006.

Ray Krone was sentenced to death in Arizona for rape and murder, even though DNA found on the victim wasn’t his. The state argued against having the DNA submitted to the database since the jury convicted him even without physical evidence. A decade later, a crime lab worker ran the DNA through the database on his own, without a court order, and found the person who actually committed the crime.

The risk of executing an innocent person is not limited to the cases where court appointed lawyers sleep through trials. Despite the best efforts of police, prosecutors, judges, juries, witnesses, and defense attorneys, mistakes can and will happen. In a capital case, even one small mistake can be deadly.

Frank Lee Smith was sentenced to death in Florida on the testimony of a single witness. No physical evidence tied him to the crime. Four years later, the same witness saw a photo of a different man and realized she had made a mistake. DNA tests later confirmed that Smith was innocent, but it was too late. He had died of pancreatic cancer in prison.

Troy Davis was executed in Georgia in 2011 for the murder of police officer Mark Allen McPhail. No physical evidence ever tied him to the crime. His conviction was based on the testimony of nine witnesses – seven of whom later recanted or changed their testimony. Of the two who kept their testimony, one has long been suspected of committing the murder himself.

When a life is on the line, one mistake is one too many. Can we afford the risk? The Death Penalty should be abolished by the Supreme Court in the United States immediately and replaced with life in prison without the possibility of parole. If a mistake is made then it can be corrected.

Hillary Clinton said that while the death penalty needs to be limited and deserves a "hard look," she does not want to abolish capital punishment. Clinton told an audience at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire that the punishment is "too frequently applied and very unfortunately often times in a discriminatory way," but that it should not be gotten rid of altogether. Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide said, her boss is “often confused” After hearing her comments on the death penalty I believe it.