Click to read the full report.
We need the death penalty to punish the “worst of the worst,” right? The terrorists and serial killers? Isn’t that what death penalty advocates always tell us?
What if we told you that almost every murder in North Carolina is charged capitally? That cases are declared capital in court before police have completed thorough investigations? That the threat of death is being used to bully people into pleading guilty to crimes, even though they might be innocent?
What if we told you that at least two people every year are prosecuted for the death penalty — spending months or years in jail, losing their homes, jobs, and financial stability — even though the state does not have enough evidence to convict them of a crime?
These are the revelations in a new report by the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, On Trial for their Lives: The Hidden Costs of Wrongful Capital Prosecutions. This is the first study in the nation to look at the often-ignored cases of people who are charged capitally and are eventually acquitted or have all charges against them dropped, sometimes on the eve of trial.
Watch this video to hear the story of a woman who faced wrongful capital prosecution for the murder of her own mother:
The report found that:
- 56 people in 31 counties have been wrongfully targeted with the death penalty since 1989. Considering that only 43 people have been executed in N.C. in the modern era, unjust capital prosecutions are more common than executions in N.C.’s capital punishment system.
- Those defendants spent a total of 112 years in jail, despite never being convicted of a crime.
- The state spent nearly $2.4 million in defense costs alone to pursue these failed cases capitally. Had the defendants been charged non-capitally, all that money could have been saved.
More surprising than the numbers were the stories of defendants unfairly targeted with the death penalty. Listen to these examples of how the death penalty has been used in North Carolina:
Jermaine Smith was tried for his life based on debunked arson science and the false accusations of a 14-year-old girl, who was coerced into implicating Smith during 15 hours of police interrogation.
Leslie Lincoln was pressured to confess to the murder of her mother and, when she refused, presented with State Bureau of Investigation lab results showing her DNA in a bloody handprint found at the crime scene. The death penalty was taken off the table only after Lincoln’s attorney discovered that her DNA sample had been switched with her mother’s DNA, and the forensic evidence against her was false.
Chris Gordon Brooks spent 17 months in jail on capital murder charges, based solely on the statements of two people: a jailhouse informant hoping for a light sentence and a paid police informant.
Smith and Lincoln were acquitted by juries, and the prosecutor dismissed Brooks’ charges just before a scheduled trial—but not before they spent a combined six years and two months in jail and faced the possibility of execution, despite the thinnest of evidence connecting them to the crimes of which they stood accused.
The death penalty corrupts our criminal justice system from beginning to end — whether suspects are being threatened with the death penalty based on weak evidence, or innocent people are sitting on death row awaiting their executions.
This report shows us that if we continue to use the death penalty in North Carolina, we will send more innocent people to death row. Let’s end this ineffective and error-prone punishment now, before it destroys the life of another innocent person.
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