The story of Glenn Ford is just another example of why the Death Penalty should be abolished.
Glenn Ford, a black man,was the longest-serving death row inmate in Louisiana, that is, until now. He was freed on March 11, 2014, after serving a sentence for a murder that he has maintained he did not commit. Ford was a suspect in the murder of Isadore Rozeman, a woman for whom Ford had done some yard work for in the past. A girlfriend of another suspect said that Ford was the culprit, but later while testifying at Ford’s trial, admitted that she had lied. Nonetheless, Ford was convicted. There were some reasons given as to why, such as the notion that the shooter was “probably left-handed” and that there were traces of gun powder found on Ford’s hands. There was no weapon found and no witnesses. Ford, not surprisingly, had an all white jury.A court later reviewed this case and agreed that prosecutors had withheld evidence beneficial to Ford but he was denied a new trial. Now Ford is being freed after thirty years, due to a ?confession by a man who had been a suspect all along.
Glenn Ford is not the first inmate death row exoneration; in fact, he is the 144th. Since the United States Supreme Court lifted their death penalty moratorium in 1973, 144 inmates on death row have now been exonerated of all charges.
The death penalty has been debated for centuries and reasons against it have ranged from moral ones, to practical ones such as cost to house maximum-security inmates and the cost of numerous appeals. Many have argued that the death penalty, along with our judicial system in general, is racially biased against minorities. I would have to agree.
According to 2013 statistics,39 percent of all defendants sentenced to death were black. Considering the 12-13 percent of the population that blacks account for, this is a disproportionately large percentage.The innate bias that people feel towards black defendants will undoubtedly play a part, not to mention the increased poverty rates in minority communities and their inability to hire the best lawyers. In fact, Ford’s 2 lawyers were court-appointed and had very little experience with jury trials OR capital cases where the death penalty was an option.
Maybe the most interesting and least talked about aspect of the death penalty,revolves around the race of the?victim. Statistics from?The Death Penalty Information Center report that since 1976, the percentage of victims in death penalty cases that were white is an astoundingly high 78; the rate for African-American victims is only 14.2 percent. ?The rates of death penalty defendants last year was much more evenly distributed between whites and blacks, but the race of the victims as we can see, is very one sided.
All of these statistics along with personal stories we often see of black men usually, exonerated because some jury wrongly convicted, new evidence presents itself, etc, prove why the death penalty must be abolished once again. The justice system is supposed to function with the idea that it is more important to protect the innocent than to convict the guilty; in other words, the most unacceptable result of the system is to put innocent people behind bars, and worst, to death. While those like Ford will see the outside world after his exoneration, many innocent people have been killed due to the system and never got their chance at freedom post-conviction. We?know?this.We don’t only know this because of the obvious reason that human judgment (juries) are often wrong as human error is a fact of life, but have real stories like those of Mr. Ford. We know that we have killed innocent people, we know that there are innocent people on death row currently, and as long as the death penalty is enforced, we will kill innocent people in the future. Even if the system was not racially prejudiced, any person no matter their color, status, wealth, etc, has the possibility of being wrongly convicted and sentenced to die. This remains a scar on the so-called morality of the United States. There is a reason every industrialized and Western nation does not have the death penalty anymore. The United States need to realize the extreme problems with this institution and outlaw it permanently.
To read more about the death penalty and racial disparities, go here.
Edited/Published by: SB
