The Bloomington Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty meets every 3rd Wednesday at 7pm.
The meetings are held at the Monroe County Public Libaray, 303 E. Kirkwood, Bloomington
Moratorium Presentation 2005
We are calling for the State of Indiana to declare a moratorium on executions. At a time when there is a worldwide movement to abolish the death penalty, we believe that we should at least halt the practice of state sanctioned killing, and demand a thorough review of the system by which men and women are sent to death row and executed.
This is not simply the wish of bleeding-heart liberals. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackman, an appointee of President Richard Nixon, spent decades attempting to tweak the system of capital punishment in America in order to guarantee its fairness. He found that it could not be done. In 1993 he stated that he was certain that more than a few innocent people have been executed in the United States. In 1994, Justice Blackman, a long time supporter of the death penalty declared, " From this day forward I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. It is virtually self-evident to me now, that no combination of procedural rules or substantive regulations ever can save the death penalty from its inherent constitutional deficiencies."
We ask you to consider whether a system declared constitutionally deficient by a conservative Republican jurist of the stature of Justice Blackman should continue to operate in the state of Indiana. We call for a moratorium because justice demands fairness, not killing.
Halting the practice of executions will not make us less safe. The death penalty cannot be justified as a necessary public safety measure because it has not been proven to reduce crime. Reasonable people might be deterred from crime by considering execution as a consequence, but people who murder are rarely thinking rationally when committing their crime. The majority of systematic research on the death penalty demonstrates that the possibility of being sentenced to death does not deter criminals from committing either calculated or spontaneous crimes. Furthermore, states that maintain the death penalty on their law books have murder rates just as high as those that do not. In fact, the murder rate in the state of New York has dropped dramatically in the past decade yet they have not executed anyone in that state for more than 40 years. Nations like Canada that have abolished the death penalty have since experienced a decline in violent crime. Use of the death penalty, therefore, is actually detrimental to the search for real solutions to violent crime because it offers a false sense that effective measures are being taken to address the issue when in fact they are not.
Since the re-instatement of the death penalty in 1973, 119 persons in the United States have been exonerated of the crime for which they were convicted and have been released from death row. Almost every year, roughly two people in the U.S. are released from death row because they are proven to be innocent. Most Americans trust this country’s justice system, but the fact remains that no matter how good the system is, it is inevitably based on human reason and judgment and is subject to error. Therefore, the specter of mistake will always exist, as will the possibility of executing an innocent person. False testimony, mistaken identification, misinterpretation of evidence, and community prejudices and pressures all too often impact the verdict and sentencing.
The average length of stay on death row for those released because of innocence is over eight years. Because of recent restrictions of the rights of death row prisoners to appeal their convictions, the length of time before a convicted person is executed will be shortened significantly, increasing the likelihood that innocent persons will be executed. There is no fail-safe system, and death is final.
When people claim that the death penalty is just, that some people deserve punishment by death, they make assumptions about the fairness of the death penalty. Capital punishment is not meted out merely to those who commit the most heinous crimes. Rather, it is prescribed quite arbitrarily: less than one percent of convicted murderers receive death sentences in the United States. Although we might assume that gravity of the crime and culpability are the main factors determining who is executed, the facts indicate otherwise. Offenders who commit similar crimes under similar circumstances receive widely different sentences. Race and gender of both offender and victim, social and economic status, location of crime and trial, local politics, plea bargaining, and pure chance are often deciding factors in capital sentencing. .
Punishment for a crime cannot be decided on the basis of the victim’s wishes. If this were the situation, all sentencing would be completely arbitrary, reflecting differing ideas about justice from case to case. A justice system, ideally, should mete out consistent penalties for criminal acts. While it is only normal to feel anger and hopelessness at the loss of an individual through the violent act of murder, we fail as a society if we can offer to those hurt by violent acts only more violence and death, rather than mercy and healing.
Many victims’ families actually oppose the death penalty. One of the most effective and passionate organizations calling for Moratorium in the United States is Murder Victims’ Families for Reconciliation, whose members argue that executions only perpetuate the violence that victimized their loved ones and draw attention and resources away from victims’ families.
The cost of an execution is substantially higher than the cost of life imprisonment. In the United States, it costs two to six times as much to execute a person than to imprison that person for life. Many states could save millions of dollars per year if they abolished the death penalty. Indiana has been in serious budget crisis for several years. The financial strain that capital punishment adds to our budget deficit could be altered if we had a moratorium in place.
At this point in time, we are not asking for abolition, but we think it is of paramount importance to call a “time out” on all executions in Indiana until a thorough review by an independent panel of scholars in ethics, law, and economics can be conducted.
Current List of Moratoriam supporters
Moratorium Resolution
