Criminal Justice - Systematic Problem Thesis

Equal Protection:

Equal protection is a fundamental constitutional protection, that in modern times, guarantees the equal effect of law to all persons. In that regard, the Supreme Court has established specific suspect classes of individuals, such as membership in a minority race, whose rights to equal protection must be guarded most scrupulously, primarily because the need to do so has been more than adequately demonstrated by aspects of relatively recent American history.

According to criminologists and researchers who have conducted studies of the impact of criminal laws in general, and of capital punishment in particular, criminal defendants who are members of minority races (as well as those who are poor) are statistically much more likely to receive the death penalty in comparison with non- minority (and wealthier) criminals convicted of identical death-penalty-eligible offenses (Schmalleger, 2007; Zalman, 2008). This discrepancy suggests that capital punishment in the U.S. still violates one of the most basic constitutional principles, and therefore, constitutes a significant problem in contemporary American criminal justice administration. Wrongful Conviction:

The other major problem arising in connection with capital punishment as it is currently implemented within the American criminal justice system has come to light more recently, as a function of advances in definitive evidence analysis and identification techniques developed through applications of DNA-based science. Specifically, now that current technologies are being used to test evidence preserved from trials in which criminal defendants were sentenced to life imprisonment and death, dozens of inmates have been proven to have been wrongfully convicted on the basis of faulty evidence such as police error, erroneous witness testimony, and prosecutorial misconduct (Lancet, 2008; Zalman, 2008).

To date, there are no known instances where an innocent subject has been put to death after erroneous conviction, but that it only attributable to the fact that several states have abolished the death penalty since their conviction and because the procedural mechanisms of the appeals processes in those states with the death penalty typically results in as much as a decade-long delay between conviction and execution (Schmalleger, 2007; Zalman, 2008). To the extent that existing procedural safeguards against erroneous conviction have been demonstrated to be inadequate, the current form of death penalty laws are another serious problem in the American criminal justice system. The fact that those inadequacies are statistically more likely to affect racial minorities compounds that problem significantly.

Global Surveys and Benchmarking Best Practices Toward a Solution:

Today, capital punishment is being phased out of the laws of many modern nations, so much so that the United Nations (U.N.) has issued an official position opposing capital punishment on principle. Notwithstanding the fact that U.N. policy lacks the weight of binding legal authority, it serves as a benchmark for global social trends (Lancet, 2008). On the other hand, some of the same nations that have shifted away from the death penalty still sanction very harsh forms of criminal sanctions, including many that would constitute bona fide torture under any objective definition as well as under U.S. law, not to mention other civil rights violations incorporated into U.S. law.

The U.S. Constitution already prohibits violations of moral principles that give rise to the problems associated with capital punishment in the U.S. Therefore, the solution is not to re-evaluate the concept of capital punishment entirely, but rather, to legislate the necessary changes in criminal procedure to ensure that: (1) the methods of its implementation are capable of greater resistance to error; (2) all criminal defendants receive comparable legal representation and treatment; and (3) procedural rules and standards of proof are adjusted to reduce the possibility of error to an absolute minimum, particularly in capital cases.

References

Dershowitz, a. (2002). Shouting Fire: Civil Liberties in a Turbulent Age. New York: Bantam Books.

Friedman, a. (2005). A History of American Law. New York: Touchstone.

Kaveny, C. (2008). Justice or vengeance: is the death penalty cruel and unusual?

Commonwealth; Feb 18/08.

The Lancet (2008). "Death Knell for the Death Penalty: A healthy advance"; Jan 5-11.

Schmalleger, F. (2007). Criminal Justice Today: An Introductory Text for the…