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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowFeatured Issue: “Should Indiana change its death penalty law?”
Yes. Indiana should rethink executing people.
The ACLU of Indiana has long believed that we should end executions—also known as the death penalty or capital punishment—in our state. Despite court decisions to the contrary, we believe that executing someone violates the principles of the Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Equally compelling are arguments that the practice prolongs the suffering of victims and their families; our legal system can’t guarantee perfect outcomes; nationally, the penalty is disproportionately imposed when the perpetrator is Black or brown and the victim is white; and the mounting costs shouldn’t be borne by Indiana taxpayers.
Nationwide, the average time between a jury imposing the death penalty and a resulting execution is more than 20 years. Throughout this time, family members of the victims must find some way to live their lives while the case goes through years of the ups and downs of the required appeals process. In contrast, even with an appropriate appeals process, the time between sentencing and certainty is much less when the punishment is a life sentence.
And, with a life sentence, exoneration is still possible. Since 2000, 105 people on death rows across the United States were found to be wrongfully convicted and had their sentences overturned. Plenty of good, talented people work hard to make sure that our legal system delivers fair, unbiased results. But our system isn’t perfect, and its imperfections carry too high a risk that innocent people will be executed.
One of the central imperfections of our legal system is well-documented racial disparities in convictions and sentencing—particularly when it comes to the death penalty. Decades of research has documented that disparity, particularly one well-known study of almost 2,000 homicides in California. It found that Black defendants were 4.6 to 8.7 times more likely—and Latino defendants were 3.2 to 6.2 times more likely—to be sentenced to death than defendants of other races who had similar charges. And it’s not just the race of defendants. The same study found that cases with at least one white victim had 2.8 to 8.8 times greater odds of ending in a death sentence than cases with no white victims.
And, if more evidence were needed, Hoosier taxpayers spend significantly more to try a death penalty case than a life without parole case. A 2010 analysis by the Indiana Legislative Services Agency found that, on average, the combined cost of trial and imprisonment for someone convicted of the death penalty was over $500,000 compared with $151,000 for someone sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. And that was before it was revealed that the state spent more than $1.1 million on the drugs used to execute people—much of that spent on drugs that expired before they were even used.
For all of these reasons, it is time for Indiana’s elected leaders to rethink whether our state should be in the execution business.•
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Editor’s note: Daley, the former executive director of the ACLU of Indiana, wrote and submitted this column prior to his departure from the organization that was announced on Sept. 19. Send comments to [email protected].
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Yes, too much time and money on death row…..appeals and whatever else. If the conviction is based on evidence and not speculative testimony only, then carry out the sentence. As for ‘cost’ a firing squad on an interior wall of the prison, use of a hood optional. The victim(s) were given none of these.