Late one night in September, 2006, a Houston police officer named Rodney Johnson pulled over a truck for speeding. The driver, Juan Quintero, was an undocumented immigrant and could not show any identification. While patting Mr. Quintero down, Mr. Johnson failed to find a small handgun in his waistband. From the backseat of the police car, Mr. Quintero shot through the driver’s seat, hitting Mr. Johnson 7 times and killing him.
At the time, Houston was the death-penalty capital of Texas, which was itself the death-penalty capital of the United States. Long before Donald Trump was deriding immigrants, Mr. Quintero became a public villain. He had previously been deported after a sexual-assault charge. He was precisely the sort of person who usually received a death sentence in Texas.
Houston had also been infamous for defence lawyers who fell asleep during trials, but Mr. Quintero was fortunate. His lawyer Danalynn Recer, who runs a tiny, donation-based non-profit called the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, mounted a massive investigation into not just the crime, but his entire life story. She directed researchers in Mexico and Texas, who worked off a list of 800 names of family members, friends and others who had met Mr. Quintero.
Armed with this knowledge, Ms. Recer told the jury about a child who was abused by his father and injured his brain at a young age, setting off a life of anxiety and addiction. Still, Mr. Quintero worked hard and got married and raised children. He killed the officer, according to this narrative, during a moment of panic in which his fight-or-flight response kicked in, and he felt tremendous remorse.
Ms. Recer was not asking the jury to find Mr. Quintero innocent, or to free him, or to say he was a good person. She was just asking them to find any reason at all to spare his life. She succeeded – he’s currently in prison, but not on death row – leading local commentators to wonder whether Texas’s famously prolific death penalty system would survive.
It has survived, but this story helps explain why capital punishment is in decline across the United States. Mr. Trump’s administration carried out an unprecedented wave of 13 federal executions during his final months, but most executions are handled by state governments and courts – and only nine states have killed prisoners in the past three years. In 1999, Texas juries sent 48 people to death row – in 2019, they sent 4.
The death penalty has always been a rare punishment in the U.S., but it has played an important role in our larger justice system, symbolically standing for the idea that the larger purpose of the system is not to help people but to punish them and exact revenge. The death penalty makes very long prison sentences, including life without the possibility of parole, appear more moderate by comparison. But these ideas are changing, and it remains to be seen whether the competing American impulse toward mercy – displayed by jurors in the Quintero case, and by much of the American public toward those executed under Mr. Trump – will similarly trickle down, allowing the U.S. to cede its reputation as the world’s largest jailer.
America has actually been here before. In the 1960s, we joined Canada, Britain and Australia and turned away from hanging, shooting and electrocuting prisoners. Then we strayed from the pack. In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that death penalty laws around the country violated the Constitution. In the following years, when many Americans were angry about civil-rights legislation and other liberal edicts from Washington, state lawmakers rewrote their laws to overcome the court’s objections and revived their execution chambers. Although the new laws focused on the mechanics of trials and jury decisions, states also changed their execution methods to lethal injection.
The death penalty can become a political issue anywhere, but as rates of violent crime increased throughout the 1980s and 90s, it became an easy way for leaders to promise that they were serious about public safety. This was especially true of prosecutors and judges, many of whom are directly elected by voters. In courtrooms across the U.S., citizens served on juries and didn’t get a robust portrait like the one Ms. Recer gave of Mr. Quintero. They were steered instead by prosecutors’ visions of murderers as psychopaths and sadists who would surely commit more murders if not sentenced to death.
Over the past two decades, however, executions and new death sentences have both been dropping. Shortly before Ms. Recer persuaded a jury in Houston to spare Mr. Quintero’s life, she represented a different man, who had killed a young girl in a sparsely populated rural county. Like Mr. Quintero, he was from Mexico, and the Mexican government helped fund his defence. (The Canadian government has also supported the defence of Canadians facing execution.) In this case, Ms. Recer didn’t need to make her case before a jury, because the prosecutor himself decided to not seek the death penalty. Among his many considerations, one was the cost. Because the courts guaranteed lawyers and investigators, local governments often had to raise taxes in order to pay for a death-penalty trial. Appeals can also cost taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Ms. Recer’s 2 clients both admitted to their crimes – but lawyers, journalists and activists have proved that a shocking number of innocent people had been sentenced to death owing to misconduct by prosecutors, shoddy work by forensic analysts and inept work by defence lawyers. The Death Penalty Information Center has found that since 1972, 1 person has been exonerated from death row for every 8 executions. These stories have shaken Americans’ faith in a punishment that cannot be reversed. At the same time, violent crime has been on the decline. Fewer murders qualify for the death penalty and politicians feel less pressure to portray themselves as tough. We have moved on to fighting about other issues, such as abortion and guns, and the death penalty has lost its cultural relevance.
But America has not entirely given up a desire for harsh punishment. Another reason why the death penalty disappeared was because states began allowing courts to sentence people to life without the possibility of parole – a sentence that some call “death by incarceration.” A few liberal politicians even support life without parole under the logic that it’s harsher than execution. “I think people who have committed truly heinous crimes should die in prison,” Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Democratic senator, told The New York Times in 2019. “Keep them in prison for all of their days.”
Opposition to the death penalty had been quietly growing in the U.S., but Mr. Trump’s execution spree brought the system’s problems out into the open. Where in the past the American media focused on the heinous crimes committed by death-row prisoners, now the focus was on the system’s problems.
Before Lisa Montgomery was executed on Jan. 13, Americans learned about her crime: she killed a pregnant woman and stole her fetus. But they also learned that Ms. Montgomery herself was a severely mentally ill victim of incest and sex trafficking. They learned that Orlando Hall raped a young woman before burying her alive, but he was also a Black man sentenced by an all-white jury. They learned that Brandon Bernard participated in a gruesome murder, but he was also an impressionable 18-year-old who played a limited role in the crime.
The U.S. Congress is now considering bills that would repeal the federal death penalty. Virginia’s state leaders have just done so, and Ohio’s leaders are considering it. President Joe Biden has pledged support for these efforts. If the U.S. were to end the death penalty tomorrow and free its 2,500 death row prisoners, we would still have the world’s largest prison population, a staggering 2.3 million people – one in nine of whom are serving a life sentence, according to The Sentencing Project. But the decline of the death penalty features lessons that activists are studying as they seek to bring these numbers down.
Among the most important: When you study the life histories of people who commit violent crimes – people like Mr. Quintero – you see a host of other problems society has failed to address, including addiction, mental-health issues and multiple forms of trauma. Lawyers and researchers like Ms. Recer have shown that people don’t necessarily commit crimes because they’re monsters who want to hurt people – they are often victims before they are perpetrators.
Even liberal Americans don’t necessarily see crime this way, although that is changing very slowly. These attitudes may not have to change before the U.S. abolishes the death penalty, but they will have to change if Americans want to join those in Europe and Canada who see crime less as an evil to be punished, and more as a problem to be solved.
Source: Toronto Globe and Mail, Opinion; Maurice Chammah, March 5, 2021. Maurice Chammah is a Texas-based journalist with the non-profit news organization The Marshall Project and the author of Let the Lord Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
