When capital punishment makes the news, it rarely is because something happens to prove its utility or necessity. In fact, the death penalty hits the headlines only when the argument for it is undercut — a telling trend that should lead the United States to join the rest of the civilized world in banning executions.
Today’s news that a Texas execution carried out in 1989 most likely sent an innocent man to death fits with this trend.
Carlos De Luna was executed in 1989 for stabbing to death a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi six years earlier. It was a ghastly crime. The trial attracted local attention, but not from concern that a guiltless man would be punished while the killer went free.
De Luna, an eighth grade dropout, maintained that he was innocent from the moment cops put him in the back seat of a patrol car until the day he died. Today, 29 years after De Luna was arrested, Liebman and his team published a mammoth report in the Human Rights Law Review that concludes De Luna paid with his life for a crime he likely did not commit. Shoddy police work, the prosecution’s failure to pursue another suspect, and a weak defense combined to send De Luna to death row, they argued.
“I would say that across the board, there was nonchalance,” Liebman told The Huffington Post. “It looked like a common case, but we found that there was a very serious claim of innocence.”
Was De Luna innocent? I don’t know. But given the questions tht should have been raised, it appears to me that his guilt was sufficient entry in doubt to have spared his life.
This is the point. The system does an awful job of protecting the accused and there is no way — and can be no way — to prove guilt beyond doubt. That makes capital punishment morally unsupportable.
It’s time to stop tinkering with the machinery of death.
Hank Kalet 