Race, economic status and geography are all important and discriminating factors in determining which criminals receive the death penalty in the United States, Diann Rust Tierny said on Friday in her speech "Justice Denied: The Implementation of the Death Penalty in the U.S."
Tierny, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project, is working toward a nationwide abolition of the death penalty. The process is not a quick one, however.
"The way we get there, to abolition, is to take people through the very exercise, which is to actually get your hands dirty, to see that there are problems, and to see that we can fix them," Tierny said.
The primary factor that unfairly determines whether a defendant will get the death penalty, according to Tierny, is race. The racial makeup of the jury is key in determining whether a defendant will get the death penalty, and the selection of a jury based on race is even a strategy taught in some defense attorney training classes.
The race of the victim of the crime is also an influential factor. Defendants in cases in which the victim is white are statistically more likely to receive the death penalty than if the victim were black.
"We have a system that is supposed to be vindicating the lives of the victims, and it is vindicating some more than others. We have a system that values some people more than others," Tierny said.
Economic status is yet another influential factor. Defendants living in poverty are not able to afford the better defense attorneys. Public defenders are less experienced with death penalty cases, and the quality of service provided is in keeping with their small salary.
Geography, too, plays a role in the handing down of a death penalty sentence, Tierny said. It is unfair that certain precincts or judges are notorious for handing down lethal sentences, while others in other states or cities are less likely to do so, even though the crime might be the same.
Tierny cited education and involvement as steps towards abolition of the death penalty. Many voters support the death penalty because they believe it should be reserved for the "worst of the worst," but this careful application is not a realistic one.
"The basic reason people support the death penalty is a gut-feeling about justice and fairness. Whatever abstract justice they think the death penalty has, this death penalty isn't anywhere near what you think it ought to be," Tierny said.
Tierny described the movement toward abolition of the death penalty as a journey and exhaulted the transition from an abstract discussion of ethics to a concrete debate over law as evidence of progress.
"When you get to the point that you are making laws, then people really have to grapple with these issues," she said.
Progress is being made in New Hampshire to restrict the types of cases to which the death penalty can be applied, New Hampshire state senator Clifton Below '78 said. A bill to abolish the juvenile death penalty, now applicable to criminals 17 and older, will be presented to lawmakers Monday. The bill proposes to restrict the age to those 18 and older.
Tierny and Below spoke as part of Friday's Death Penalty Symposium sponsored by Dartmouth Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International at Dartmouth College, Dartmouth College Greens, The Dartmouth Free Press, the Tucker Foundation, Panarchy undergraduate Society and the Rockefeller Center.
