I don’t watch a lot of detective shows, but “Blue Bloods” is a good one. I like the Catholic content, with the Reagan family sitting down to meals graced by a prayer. And the “Mentalist” is quirky in a fun way. Maybe you watch more of them, so you might know whether the subject of the death penalty gets an intelligent airing. For sure there are many show scripts that have an emotional pitch for severe punishment of a heinous crime, with the family of the victim demanding justice. Good drama usually has clashes among people, with professionals being annoyed by the media reporting on a trial. Does our entertainment industry do justice to capital punishment and the real-life situations in real courts?
Some crimes are so terrible they cry out for an arrest, any arrest, and beleaguered police and district attorneys feel the heat of public opinion, which influences their tenure on their public service positions. In such heat, sometimes erroneous arrests are made. The wrong person is charged, found guilty and jailed, possibly pending execution. Watchdog committees have dug back into cold cases and into currently hot ones and found that there had been a rush to judgment. An accusation against someone can acquire a forceful momentum, so it is harder to consider new evidence, especially if the trial has racial characteristics.
In my limited viewing I have not seen shows detailing how much more expensive it is to give a convicted capital offender the death penalty rather than a life sentence. That might strike you as strange. Would not the warehousing of a prisoner for many years add up in meals, heat and other maintenance expenses? Would not an execution bring the state’s financial burden to a quick end? It might — if we were not so committed to constitutional fairness in our courts, which provide a system of appeals a death-row prisoner uses until it is exhausted.
We already know that poor people commit more violent crimes than do well off people. So this means that the state is paying the legal bills for the many appeals filed by public defenders. Advantaged people hire their own lawyers. Taxpayers foot the bill for the disadvantaged even if they want the convicted person executed because they are sure from having followed the case that the system has fairly found this person guilty. In point of fact, the average execution costs the taxpayer far more than does a life sentence. Now that the public has been alerted to this, opinion polls report that most Americans favor the death penalty unless a watertight life-with-no-parole sentence is handed down.
However, the cost argument pales into insignificance when we consider the central matter of erroneous conviction. Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts narrates the case of Anthony Graves, a Texas prisoner for 18 years, 12 of them spent on death row. A person of color, he was convicted of the murder of an entire family, including its four children, even though there was no physical evidence linking him to the crime, even though he had no motive to hurt complete strangers, and even though he had three witnesses testifying he was at home at the time of the crime.
What moved the jury? Fellow prisoners, perhaps looking for time off for bad behavior, testified they heard him confess. One of them was Robert Carter, who himself admitted committing the crime, but who at first fingered Graves. Carter, executed in 2000, repeatedly recanted the false accusation to the district attorney, but the latter failed to divulge this. It must have been too much trouble to run another trial. A later district attorney freed the innocent Graves.
Hundreds of cases like this disgrace our court system every year. This is no fluke. TV shows have shown incompetent police work or corrupt court officials — and honest mistakes. So we know it is more common than one unfortunate racial hatchet job. Among other reasons, Lady Justice is blindfolded so that she would not give preference to white people over black, to well off people over the poor.
Our country is one of the few remaining ones still executing capital offenders. We’re right down there with Yemen and China. But that is less than a cogent argument, given our stubborn refusal to join the enlightened nations on other things like universal health insurance, as though we like previous existing conditions and no coverage for tens of millions of Americans. Oh well, what’s on TV?
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