But you would be better off if you forgot about a-life-for-a-life revenge and began supporting the much cheaper and just as final LWOP, for the death penalty is the least efficient form of revenge. Since the United States cranked up "modern" capital punishment with new rules in 1976, there hasn't been a year in which the nation has managed to execute even 3 percent of its death-row inmates, and the average year saw the demise of fewer than 2 percent. Of the approximately 6,700 people sentenced to die between 1973 and 1999, only 598--fewer than one in eleven--were executed. And about four times as many were given new trials and lesser sentences or gained clemency. California saw its death row, the largest in the nation, grow from 350 to about 550 inmates between 1992 and 2000, while it executed only seven men; in the same period, state and federal courts overturned twenty-three of its death sentences.

Obviously, any spectator waiting around for revenge in a particular case may wait so long he will forget what he's waiting for; the average stay on death row before execution is about eleven years, and a residency of twenty years isn't unusual. When Texas executed Gary Graham amid much controversy recently, it got rid of a boarder who had been on death row eighteen years. Karla Faye Tucker, the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War, had been there thirteen years. More to the point--and more to the embarrassment of the prosecutors and judges who sent them there--since the death penalty was reinstated, revenge-seekers have watched eighty-nine condemned men walk out the prison gates free, either because evidence was uncovered proving their innocence or because some appellate court decided they had received a trial that had no relationship to justice.

The Corruption of Justice

Such reversals are rather common, because some judges and prosecuting attorneys just aren't very smart and others (sometimes with the help of crooked law enforcement officers) are a crafty bunch who abuse and exploit the law for political purposes. Those groups together have helped turn the death penalty into a con game that is corruptly and stupidly administered. Two dramatic studies supporting that conclusion recently made headlines everywhere. This past June, researchers at Columbia University's Justice Project completed a statistical study of death-penalty appeals that passed through the nation's courts between 1973 and 1995. They found that 2,370 death sentences--seven out of ten handed down during those years--had been thrown out on appeal because of serious flaws in the trials: Perhaps the judge had given prejudicial instructions to the jury, or the prosecutor had suppressed evidence, or the cops had falsified evidence, or the defense attorney had been totally incompetent, or there had been some other equally unacceptable conduct. It was enough to make the authors of this monumental study conclude that the death penalty system is "wasteful and broken...collapsing under the weight of its own mistakes."

Right now the Columbia University group is trying to finish the job, plowing through the thousands of cases reviewed by hundreds of state and federal appellate judges since 1995. Its preliminary finding is that "the error-proneness and irrationality" shown in the original study "has not somehow evaporated in the succeeding four years...and may be getting worse."

The second major study was done by a crack team of reporters at the Chicago Tribune who probed the muddy underpinnings of justice in Illinois. They made the first comprehensive examination of all 285 death-penalty cases handled in that state since the penalty was restored twenty-two years ago. This was their general conclusion: "Capital punishment in Illinois is a system so riddled with faulty evidence, unscrupulous trial tactics and legal incompetence that justice has been forsaken." In thirty-three cases the defendant was sentenced to die at a trial where he had an attorney who was disbarred or suspended at some time in his career for incompetent or criminal actions. In forty-six cases the prosecutor's evidence relied heavily on a jailhouse snitch; in twenty cases the prosecutor's case depended on a crime lab's comparison of hairs--and both kinds of evidence are considered so unreliable that up-to-date courts treat them as bad jokes. And in thirty-five cases, a defendant sent to death row was black and the jury that condemned him was all white.

(The US Constitution forbids racial discrimination in jury selection, but prosecutors have ways of getting around the prohibition, and judges often ignore the violation. Because blacks--for historically good reasons--are known to be far less likely to support the death penalty, prosecutors go out of their way to keep them off capital juries. In Philadelphia, there was a secret school that taught prosecutors how to block blacks from juries.)

The Tribune noted that "forty percent of Illinois's death-penalty cases are characterized by at least one of the above elements. Sometimes, all of the elements appear in a single case. Dennis Williams, who is black, was sentenced to die by an all-white Cook County jury; prosecuted with evidence that included a jailhouse informant and hair comparison; and defended, none too well, by an attorney who was later disbarred."

Which brings up another major cost of capital cases. In several states, taxpayers have had to fork over multimillion-dollar settlements to wrongly convicted death-row inmates. Williams, mentioned above, got nearly $13 million for his eighteen years of wrongful imprisonment. Because there were so many errors by judges and so much misconduct by prosecutors and ineptitude by defense attorneys, the Illinois Supreme Court has vacated 49 percent of the death sentences and ordered new trials or new sentencing.

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