owing is a summary of the capital-punishment states, plus their methods of execution (Death Penalty Information Center, 2001).
Race, which is connected to socioeconomic demographics, figures into broader questions of fairness in capital cases, where fairness is the equivalent of competent defendant advocacy consistent with constitutional guarantees. As Lerner explains, aside from execution itself:
[N]o issue vexes critics of capital punishment more than the specter of inadequate representation. Because defendants in capital cases are disproportionately black, often indigent, they are rarely represented by trial wizards and legal scholars. And in an adversarial system based on the notion that justice is the product of a clash between evenly matched advocates, second-rate representation can translate --literally--into a death sentence (Lerner, 1998, p. 46).
High-profile exoneration of persons wrongfully convicted and placed on death row in recent years has had the effect of interrogating judicial praxis in capital cases. In 1964, years before Furman, Bedau abstracted 74 cases since 1893 "in which wrongful conviction of criminal homicide [were] . . . proved beyond doubt." In eight of those cases, execution was the result (Bedau, 1964, p. 436, 438). Meanwhile, Shapiro (1998, p. 22) cites a statement by a retiring Florida Supreme Court justice: "If one innocent person is executed along the way, then we can no longer justify capital punishment."
In a report published in mid-2000 arguing that death as punishment increases the importance of a reliable conviction and sentence, Liebman, et al., describe a 23-year review of 5,760 capital sentences and 4,578 appeals, concluding is that "serious error, error substantially undermining the reliability of capital verdicts--has reached epidemic proportions throughout our death penalty system" (1). Some 68% of capital judgments were judged "seriously flawed." The death-penalty "system," they ...