Jamie Lynn Perna has missed the boat in her column "Murderers Should Be Put to Death" (Wednesday, April 23). I am a law student and death (penalty) opponent, but my arguments have little to do with trying to rehabilitate murderers or the risk of executing the innocent. The strongest argument against the death penalty, an argument ignored by Perna, is that the death penalty is applied in a freakish and arbitrary manner. In other words, people are being sentenced to death, not based upon the seriousness of their crime, but on irrelevant factors.
In 1977, the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in the United States, provided that death penalty statutes: (1) significantly narrow who is eligible for the death penalty and (2) allow the sentencer (sic) to consider mitigating circumstances when considering whether to give mercy to the defendant. The idea is that only those who most deserve the death penalty should receive it and that only relevant factors are considered when making this determination.
The system in place today is woefully inadequate at meeting this goal. Some of the most extensive sociological studies ever done on any subject have been on the death penalty. These studies have found that race and socioeconomic status are important factors when determining whether an individual will receive the death penalty. An individual who killed a white victim is, according to the Baldus Study, 4.3 times more likely to receive the death penalty than an individual who killed a non-white person. A study was also done in Philadelphia, which showed that a defendant who killed a rich white man was much more likely to get the death penalty than a defendant who killed a poor black man. Furthermore, an individual who is poor and cannot afford his own attorney is also much more likely to receive the death penalty. In fact, most of the time, the prosecutor will not even seek the death penalty if there is a "fair fight." These studies show that the death penalty is not, in fact, sentencing to death only those who most deserve the death penalty, but is sentencing people to death based upon arbitrary factors. No one has disputed the validity of these studies.
I have little compassion for murderers, and I think that many of them should spend the rest of their lives behind bars. Some of them probably even deserve to die. However, as Supreme Court Justice Blackmun stated towards the end of his career: "The death experiment has failed." It has indeed.
