OUTLINE

Lethal Injection and Wrongful Convictions

Informants, issues surrounding use of

False tips

Invasions of individual privacy by informants

Cooperating witnesses

Inequitable sentencing

Eye Witness Identification or Misidentification in Texas

Lethal Injection and Wrongful Convictions

A more recent debate on the topic of cruel and unusual punishment has focused attention on the most common method of carrying out executions: lethal injection. Critics maintain that death by lethal injection which involves the intravenous administration of a series of toxic chemicals is cruel because it paralyzes the body while that person is experiencing acute pain. They see this form of execution as on par with the electric chair, which also had originally been intended as a humanitarian and painless solution to carrying out the death penalty. In Bases v. Banner (2003), the Supreme Court ruled, 7-2, which lethal injection does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, declaring that some pain, whether accidental or as part of the death process, is permissible (Tyler p.11-27).

Some people have turned against the death penalty because they have lost confidence in the justice system due to the many reports of wrongful convictions. In February 1997, the American Bar Association passed a resolution calling on states to desist from carrying out death sentences until ensuring that capital cases “are administered fairly and impartially” in order to “minimize the risk that innocent parties may be executed.” From 1973 to 2008, a total of 129 people had been released from death row after being acquitted, having charges against them dropped, or receiving a governor's pardon based on newly discovered evidence (Maclin p.573-635). The average person experiencing a wrongful conviction spent nearly ten years in prison. In sixteen of these cases, DNA evidence brought exoneration. Most dramatically, in 2000, Illinois governor George Ryan cleared the state's death row of 164 inmates and imposed a moratorium on executions, citing his concern about the state's thirteen wrongful convictions. Prior to leaving office in 2003, Ryan commuted all the death sentences to life in prison. In the meantime, Congress passed the Justice for All Act of 2004, which contains a provision to expand post-conviction testing of DNA evidence to address the problem of wrongful convictions (Sarat p.5-20).

About a year ago, it was reported that Randall Dale Adams had died, bringing to a close one of the more tragic stories in recent Texas history. A construction worker from Ohio, Adams (pictured here, in 1989) was convicted and sentenced to die in 1977 for the murder of Dallas police officer Robert W. Wood. He spent twelve years behind bars and, in 1979, came within three days of being executed before being released in 1989 after the key eyewitness recanted his previous testimony. The story was brought to widespread attention by the landmark documentary The Thin Blue Line, and Adams's case became a rallying point for advocates of criminal justice reform. But after a few years of speeches and television appearances, he mostly shunned the spotlight, and by the time he died he was living in complete obscurity. When his obituary ran last June, he had already ...