By Brian Carnell

Friday, July 14, 2000

In its latest issue, |The Nation| ran a piece by actor Mike Farrell on the "success" the anti-Capital Punishment forces are having, Death Penalty Politics. I sent the following letter to the editor in response:

Editor, The Nation:

I must respectfully disagree with Mike Farrell when he claims in the July 24, 2000 issue of The Nation that anti-capital punishment forces are on the verge of a victory. Farrell would have us believe that, "...a public once gulled into believing that state killing, discomfiting as it may be, was the necessary tool of a properly functioning justice system intent on providing them a safe society, is now exposed to the rapidly emerging image of a chamber of horrors operating in the service of partisan advantage."

Farrell is deluding himself. Rather than make the case for the immorality of capital punishment, major anti death penalty groups and individuals have instead concentrated excessively on publicizing the risk of wrongful executions. The problem with this strategy is that the major tool used to uncover such convictions, namely DNA evidence, is a double-edged sword. While there has been a temporary drop in support for the death penalty due to questions of wrongful verdicts (only 2/3rds of Americans support it in recent surveys), the clear subtext in most of the news coverage is that widespread DNA testing can come close to guaranteeing that no innocent person is ever put to death.

The recent debacle with Ricky McGinn in Texas where the DNA testing of evidence has apparently confirmed McGinn's death is going to reinforce this view. Capital punishment is not going away, but is likely to come back with a vengeance with special appeals and provisions for DNA testing. Rather than being on the edge of victory I suspect we are going to see an expansion of capital punishment as voters become more confident that modern scientific methods will make it next to impossible to execute innocent persons.

By failing to make a persuasive moral case against capital punishment, and instead focusing so much attention on the issue of possible mistakes in enforcement of capital punishment, the anti-death penalty movement has provided the other side with the blueprint to ensure state executions continue probably into the next century.

Source:

Death Penalty Politics. Mike Farrell, The Nation, July 24, 2000.

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