This Republican primary season, stories of marriage mishaps, Mormonism, and media biases have abounded.  Amid the torrent of these high-profile issues, little attention has been paid to a usually controversial and high-visibility subject – the death penalty.  You may be surprised to learn that the four remaining Republican candidates vary widely in their positions on the legitimacy of this form of punishment.

Gingrich and Romney support the death penalty, with Gingrich even suggesting its expansion to include drug smuggling crimes in 1995.  On the other hand, Paul and Santorum are less enthusiastic.  Paul, who early in his career supported the death penalty, now vehemently opposes it primarily because of concerns about wrongful convictions.  Paul has explained, “after years spent in Washington, I have become more aware than ever of the government’s ineptness and the likelihood of its making mistakes.”  Santorum has similar concerns about wrongful convictions, tinged with his religious concerns as a Catholic.  As the saying goes, better that ten guilty go free than one innocent suffers.

While the general public is seemingly less conflicted than the fifty/fifty candidates, wrongful convictions are beginning to cause more concern.  A 2011 Pew Research Poll revealed that sixty two percent of Americans support the death penalty.  The numbers rise to eighty four percent and seventy three percent when conservative Republicans and moderate to liberal Republicans are polled, respectively.  This is actually the lowest level of support for the death penalty since 1972, with twenty seven percent of people citing concerns about wrongful convictions as their main reason for opposition.  This number has risen from just eleven percent of people concerned in 1991.

The problem of wrongful convictions is one Northwestern has taken a personal interest in solving.  The impressive attorneys and law students behind Northwestern Law’s Center on Wrongful Convictions have been responsible for the exoneration of forty-eight Illinois prisoners – thirteen of whom had been sentenced to death.  These exonerations make up a substantial part of the ninety-eight convictions overturned in Illinois since 1989.  The Center also played a pivotal role in convincing former Governor George Ryan to place a moratorium on executions in January 2003, and in the abolition of the death penalty signed by Governor Quinn in March of 2011.

The Center on Wrongful Convictions is just one of over a dozen of legal clinics at Northwestern Law where practicing attorneys collaborate with students to work on a number of causes, ranging from entrepreneurship assistance to international human rights.  Another Northwestern legal clinic, the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center, has recently assisted the wrongfully convicted in Illinois in winning substantial settlements from the state.  This past January, a federal jury in Chicago awarded T.J. Jimenez $25 million in damages for harm suffered as a result of his wrongful imprisonment from 1993 through 2009.  Jimenez was convicted at age thirteen.

With so many innocent death row inmates exonerated in Illinois alone, and the amount of resources expended by governments both in executing prisoners and in paying damages to those ultimately exonerated, Northwestern’s clinics bring into focus a compelling reason to rethink support for the ultimate form of punishment.  Many conservatives legitimately cite crime prevention and retribution as rational reasons to support the use of the death penalty.  The recent death penalty sentence handed down to the second killer in the 2007 Connecticut home invasion murders lends credence to this rationale.  There, a mother and her two daughters were brutally raped and murdered and the family’s home burned to the ground in a robbery gone wrong.

However, as the numbers of wrongly convicted rise, one can’t help but wonder if it might be smart to temper our support of the death penalty with a healthy concern for the maintenance of a justice system in which people need not be concerned about being put to death for crimes they haven’t committed.

Photo by Adam Jones, Ph.D.

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