Beyond The Game Justice Gets Done The System Works Keep Death Penalty. It Is An Act Of Justice.

Stubbornly, most Americans support the death penalty. This, despite the best efforts of the activists who shake their fists at police and wring their hands over all those poor, accused murderers.

The latest assault on the death penalty is as ambitious as it is typical. James Liebman, a Columbia University law professor who has worked as defense attorney in a number of capital murder cases, conducted a study. He and his team scanned the appellate paperwork from every capital case between 1973 and 1995. They tallied statistics. Their statistics reflect their opinions about the “errors” in each case.

This is what they discovered: When appellate courts review death penalty trials they often decide mistakes were made. So, new trials occur. Defendants usually are convicted, again. When convicted, some are sent to prison and some are sentenced to death.

Breathless over this completely unsurprising revelation, death penalty foes conclude that the justice system is broken and the death penalty must be abandoned. To embellish the point, they recount sensational anecdotes, as if what might have occurred in certain notorious cases occurs in every case.

There are two problems with this logic. First, the study actually shows the system works: errors are found, adjustments are made. Second, the cooked statistics and broad-brush anecdotes gloss over the most important considerations in every single murder. Namely: The victim. The crime. The real-world circumstances. The brutalized body. The grief-stricken loved ones. The specific evidence - all of it - that led police to the accused.

Liebman, and others of his ilk, consider it objectionable when juries are allowed to glimpse that real world. For criminal defense attorneys, trials and appeals are a game. The goal in the game is to suppress evidence of guilt, win a new trial and then suppress more of the evidence of guilt. If the jury is kept in the dark and the killer wears a clean white shirt to court, maybe the defense will “win.” The public knows this. The public places sympathy where sympathy belongs: with crime victims.

Yes, the system has shortcomings. That is why a round of appeals is appropriate. If a shortcoming is found, the right response is to fix that shortcoming, not to abandon the search for justice. Justice is not the game lawyers play. Justice occurs at the game’s end, when murderers pay for taking innocent life, by forfeiting theirs.