Report shows another flaw in the death penalty – NC capital cases built on flimsy evidence

District attorneys who choose to bring capital charges often do so as an expression of the public’s outrage over a heinous crime. But a new report suggests that putting a defendant on trial for his life also can involve another sort of outrage – the pursuit of flimsy cases at high cost to taxpayers and great damage to the accused.

The report from the Center for Death Penalty Litigation in North Carolina looked at problems with death penalty cases from an unusual perspective. Instead of focusing on defendants who were wrongly convicted, the center studied 56 North Carolina capital cases brought between 1989 and 2015 that ended with an acquittal or dismissal of all charges

The finding of 56 cases is a remarkably high number over the past quarter-century given that the state’s death row population is 148. Presumably, prosecutors would not pursue costly, extended death penalty cases unless there was a high probability of a conviction. But the report found shoddy cases derailed by serious errors or misconduct, including witness coercion, evidence not properly disclosed and bungled investigations.

The report puts its findings into a sobering context: “This means that over the past 26 years, an average of two people each year have been targeted for the death penalty even though there was very little evidence of guilt, let alone evidence that they were worthy of the state’s harshest punishment.”

Pursuing these cases has cost taxpayers nearly $2.4 million, the report estimates. But dollars hardly measure the full cost. Defendants in these cases spent a total of 112 years in jail awaiting trial in less than solid cases, more than half of them based on the testimony or statements of witnesses who were found to be unreliable. The time in jail and the stigma of the charges can cost the defendants all their financial resources and their reputations.

Prosecutors say they need the death penalty not only for the worst of murders, but also as a tool for negotiating plea bargains. But the number of failed cases suggests that innocent people unwilling to plead to lesser charges end up facing the state’s ultimate and irreversible penalty. The death penalty offers prosecutors leverage, but that leverage is not worth the risk of sending innocent people to their death or to decades on death row.

That one innocent person is sentenced to death is too many. Yet the truth is many innocent people are victims of this ultimate injustice. About 150 people nationally have been exonerated after serving time on death row. There have been nine such cases in North Carolina. Last year in North Carolina, the state’s longest-serving death row inmate, Henry McCollum, was exonerated.

In North Carolina, there have been no executions since 2006 because of concerns about the drugs used and the refusal of doctors to participate in a process that by law requires a doctor’s presence. Some in the North Carolina General Assembly are trying to streamline the path to execution by proposing a change that would allow medical personnel other than doctors to fulfill the required medical role.

This report adds another chapter to the evidence that the death penalty and the pursuit of it can border on being crimes in themselves. The record demands that the wrongs wrought by this pursuit of vengeance be ended by the pursuit of justice.

This story was originally published June 24, 2015 at 7:28 PM with the headline "Report shows another flaw in the death penalty – NC capital cases built on flimsy evidence."