If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed…Serious questions are being raised about whether the death penalty is being fairly administered in this country. Perhaps it’s time to look at minimum standards for appointed counsel in death cases and adequate compensation for appointed counsel when they are used.
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor
Speech to the Minnesota Women Lawyers group
July 2, 2001
The American criminal justice system is broken.
Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in the 1970s, 130 people have been exonerated from death row in 26 states – roughly one for every nine executed. In fact, the most comprehensive study of capital trials ever conducted found that nearly seven of every 10 death sentences handed down by state courts from 1973 to 1995 were overturned due to “serious, reversible error,” including egregiously incompetent defense counsel, suppression of exculpatory evidence, eyewitness misidentification, false confessions, snitch and accomplice testimony, and unreliable forensic science.
Research into exonerations of innocent people has yielded much information on the primary causes of wrongful convictions and has identified a number of common, preventable errors. To promote solutions to the problem of wrongful convictions, The Justice Project has constructed a national program of initiatives designed to increase the fairness and accuracy of the criminal justice system.
From prosecutors to victims’ rights groups, from defense lawyers to judges to law enforcement, reasonable people agree that our system of justice must protect the innocent and punish the guilty — not the other way around.
