UF Professor’s Death Penalty Study Supports Recent ABA Decision

February 5, 1997

GAINESVILLE — A new study on capital punishment co-authored by a University of Florida professor shows nearly 70 inmates have been released from death row during the past 25 years because of doubts about their guilt.

Michael Radelet, chairman of UF’s sociology department and a longtime researcher of death penalty issues, said the study he helped write strengthens the American Bar Association’s recommendation Monday to halt executions until fair use can be assured.

“The position taken by the ABA is extremely significant,” Radelet said. “Lawyers know better than anyone when people are being punished unfairly. There are death penalties handed down today because of bad luck, racial bias or because of politically motivated prosecutors.”

On Monday, the ABA’s House of Delegates adopted a recommendation for a capital punishment moratorium, which likely will become the focus of the group’s lobbying efforts during upcoming legislative sessions. The announcement marks the first time the 370,000-lawyer organization has taken a position on the death penalty.

Ron Tabak, a New York lawyer who helped draft the ABA’s position on capital punishment, said the study prepared by Radelet and his colleagues was a factor in the group’s decision.

Radelet compiled the case studies with William S. Lofquist, assistant professor at State University of New York-Geneseo, and Hugo Adam Bedau, professor at Tufts University. The 60-page study is slated to appear in this month’s special death penalty issue of the Cooley Law Review.

Radelet said a close examination of the cases in which prisoners were released from death row reveals the luck that was required to gain their freedom. Circumstances such as suppressed evidence coincidentally being uncovered, new DNA evidence or true culprits coming forward are examples of the inmates’ fortunes.

“These prisoners weren’t let out of prison because of the system,” Radelet said. “They were let out in spite of the system. If the system had worked the way in which it was designed, these prisoners would have been dead before their innocence was discovered.”

Initial research by Bedau and Radelet on conviction of the innocent was published in 1987 in the Stanford Law Review. The study documented 350 cases in the 20th century in which people were wrongly convicted of potentially capital offenses, including 23 cases in which defendants who probably were innocent were executed. The documented cases were expanded to 417 in 1992, Radelet said.

The professor said death penalty cases create great pressure on police officials, state prosecutors and judges to arrest and convict someone. Consequently, he said, these cases are more likely to have errors than other felony cases.

“The fact that so many innocent people could be on death row combined with constitutional errors in a new federal law required us to take the stand we took,” Tabak said. “The death penalty is systemically unfair and lacking in due process. Once unreasonable limitations and restrictions are eliminated, we wouldn’t objections to continuing capital punishment.”