Why I’m against the death penalty

Too many men and women have needlessly suffered.

Too many witnesses did not get it right.

The judicial system can break down.

I wrestled with conflicting values on life.

I abandoned any support I had for the death penalty in the United States.

Before there was such a thing as DNA evidence, most people in our nation felt comfortable with the belief that our system of justice was reliable, unyielding to error and righteous. Now, however, men and women are being released from prisons across the country after serving decades for crimes they did not commit.

Some of the exonerees were exceedingly fortunate to have been languishing in prisons where the state had no death penalty. Surely, some would have been executed.

Hundreds have been freed from our nation’s prisons despite a system where the DNA evidence is destroyed or lost, courts do not cooperate, and the general public thinks you are most certainly guilty. Most of these erroneous convictions have been upended by law school students volunteering their time.

Nick Yarris was convicted of rape and murder in Pennsylvania and served 23-years on death row before DNA evidence proved him innocent. He was accused of horrible crimes, sent to a notorious prison in Huntington, Penn., and was not allowed to speak for the first two years of his incarceration.

When Yarris was being sentenced, he told the judge “to go to hell.” Then, Yarris looked up at him and said, “You and I both know I didn’t kill anyone.” Yarris recalled the judge kept his face downward, and could not look defendant in the eye.

This was the beginning of a mental battle Yarris would wage within himself, refusing to let captivity and a wrongful conviction tear him down.

As if the 23-years on death row were not enough of a setback, Yarris was released to the streets and given a grand total of $5.37 and no further assistance, nothing else from the government. Had he actually committed a crime and served time, the state parole laws would have entitled him to healthcare, job training and placement in society (half-way housing).

Wrecked and depleted, Yarris made his way back to his family and said, “There are two things that I know: Family is everything, and family is everything.” Truly, family was all Yarris had.

In Florida, Wilton Dedge was convicted of rape and given two life sentences at the age of 20. The case against Dedge was so shoddy he never should have been brought to trial. But the real jaw-dropper came after DNA testing became available after decades of incarceration that proved Dedge was innocent; the Assistant Attorney General of Florida had the audacity to declare Dedge was not subject to any form of relief.

Dedge, proven entirely innocent, was forced to remain in prison for three additional years before he finally received a ruling allowing him to leave. Some 22-years later, at the age of 42, Dedge was finally exonerated and released from prison.

Four inmates have been cleared, so far, in Georgia using DNA evidence.

Clarence Harrison spent 17 years in a Georgia prison on a rape, kidnapping and robbery conviction before being proven innocent. Harrison’s experience had a Joseph-in-Egypt like quality, overcoming adversity and baring fruit. Prison time stalled his teen years gone wrong, and he met Yvonne Zellars, who ministered to him while behind bars.

Zellars encouraged Harrison to keep trying to prove his innocence. Finally, Harrison received legal assistance from the Georgia Innocence Project, was proven innocent, and married Zellars 18 days after being exonerated.

The exoneration of Willie “Pete” Williams, according to then-third-year law student and Georgia Innocence Project intern Cliff Williams was “pretty much a miracle.”

Working on a completely unrelated case, intern Cliff Williams just happened to run across the file of Pete Williams and he inquired about the critical evidence listed in the file to see if the physical evidence, dating back to 1985, had been destroyed. Luckily, for Pete Williams, the evidence had never been cleared out of the vault.

By the time Pete Williams was set free, he had spent half of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit.

Sadly, according to the Innocence Project, eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of wrongful convictions nationwide, playing a role in more than 75 percent of convictions overturned through DNA testing.

In other cases, people with incentives to testify (known as informants or “snitches”) — particularly incentives that are not disclosed to the jury — are the central evidence in convicting an innocent person. Even worse, some are wrongfully convicted because they are represented by an ineffective, incompetent or overburdened defense lawyer.

After determining the judicial system had some fatal flaws (including the use of torture to obtain confessions), then-Illinois Governor George Ryan commuted the sentences of all death row inmates in his state to life without the possibility of parole.

Like Gov. Ryan, I once thought the death penalty was an important part of the system, a deterrent of sorts, capable of making criminals think twice before committing heinous crimes.

I began to recognize a sharp conflict in my Christian values, a tug-of-war between pro-life and pro-capital punishment. I confessed to shaping Christianity around my values, rather than accepting the values Jesus actually lived before us. I could no longer rationalize defending life at conception and terminating it at will in later life.

But the overwhelming force, the brutal realization which landed me clearly on the other side of the fence, was the Innocence Project (www.innocenceproject.org). In all honesty, I cannot help but think of how many innocent people we have imprisoned or executed over many generations.

When you look at how many sincere eyewitness accounts end up being overturned by indisputable DNA evidence, keeping in mind that many cases have no DNA evidence as a backup, the system appears less reliable, endangering innocent human beings.

[Steve Brown is the former mayor of Peachtree City. He can be reached at stevebrownptc@ureach.com.]