Stevens: The Death Penalty System is Broken

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens is speaking out, and he's making himself heard loud and clear on the death penalty.

Stevens, who retired in June after serving 35 years on the bench and authoring countless opinions that changed the shape of American history, put his public face forward this weekend with an appearance on "60 Minutes" and an article in the New York Review of Books on the death penalty.

His NYRB article fronts as an examination of David Garland's new book, "Peculiar Institution: America's Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition," but the article is much more than that. It's an historical analysis of death penalty jurisprudence from a man who studied and lived and created this history, and it shares some of Stevens' personal journey from support for executions in 1976 to his belief today that the death penalty is unconstitutional.

Stevens brings the history of death penalty decisions at the nation's highest court to life and suggests that if the makeup of the court had been different at a few key moments, the death penalty may not have survived. He points to the racial disparities, to the disturbing ties between elected prosecutors and death penalty cases and to legislative biases in authorizing or abolishing the death penalty.

"To be reasonable," he writes, "legislative imposition of death eligibility must be rooted in benefits for at least one of the five classes of persons affected by capital offenses." He goes on to examine these five classes (victims, survivors, paricipants in the judicial process, the general public and the defendants themselves), finding arguments against execution in considering each group. Vengeance shouldn't be a primary motivator, jury selection biases the system toward the death penalty, death cases grind on our judicial systems and any deterrent effect is questionable, he writes.

While Stevens is writing from the world he knows best -- the court -- he has built a strong argument for legislatures acting to abolish the death penalty. Lawmakers should consider the benefits to society before passing death penalty laws or rejecting laws that would abolish executions, and they should ensure that the law, and any executions that would take place under that law, are "based on reason rather than caprice and emotion."

For Illinois lawmakers, this isn't an academic exercise. A bill to abolish the death penalty in Illinois is making its way through the state legislature and, despite stalling this week, could come up for a vote early next month. The Chicago Tribune argued passionately in an editorial over the weekend that the time has come to end this costly and unjust punishment in the state. Stevens is a native of Illinois and it was his experiences growing up there that helped shape his philosophy on criminal justice. His family the victim of an armed home invasion when he was a child and his own father was wrongfully convicted (of a white-collar crime) in Illinois. He knows that the system sometimes gets it wrong. He knows that not everyone gets the same justice. His views on the death penalty, reached through a personal journey of study and contemplation, should persudae Illinois lawmakers to do the right thing when the bill comes up for a vote.

Join Change.org and Equal Justice USA in calling for an end to executions in Illinois.

Photo Credit: Steve Petteway