Deadly Mistakes

Last week senior officials at the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) learned of 3,000 pages of documents connected to the Oklahoma bombing trial that had not been previously turned over to Timothy McVeigh’s lawyers as required by law. Despite McVeigh’s own confession of guilt, the loss of thousands of documents in the prosecution of his case is deeply concerning.

This page is opposed to the death penalty for moral reasons. Furthermore, the death penalty does not deter crime, nor is it administered fairly. Yet even those who favor the death penalty can recognize the seriousness of the McVeigh discovery. The human flaws in the administration of justice raise a significant danger that innocent people have been and will be executed for crimes they did not commit.

More than 100 boxes of materials in the McVeigh case were never turned over to defense lawyers. If an error of this magnitude can occur in the most carefully prosecuted death penalty case in years, how can we feel secure about the quality of justice in the hundreds of death penalty cases heard annually at the state level? Federal prosecutors are often more experienced than their state counterparts, and the FBI and Department of Justice have far more resources than most state prosecutors. True, the McVeigh case was also more complex than most capital prosecutions, but the discovery of the McVeigh documents brings the possibility of a wrongful execution into relief.

According to the Congressional testimony yesterday of FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, nothing in the newly discovered documents is material to the question of McVeigh’s guilt. But such near-mistakes are anything but rare in the American legal system. In 1981, Clifford Henry Bowen was sentenced to death in Oklahoma despite 12 alibi witnesses after prosecutors failed to turn over exculpatory evidence. Similar stories could be told for 16 other Americans in the last 25 years, all of whom were convicted after exculpatory evidence was withheld from the defense, either in error or intentionally. In a sense, these men are the lucky ones: their innocence was discovered before their execution. The less fortunate do not have their cases reopened.

As human beings, we can never devise a perfect justice system. With the death penalty, however, our mistakes are permanent, and evidence found after an execution cannot help the wrongfully accused. Since 1976, 94 individuals have been released after wrongful convictions in capital cases. These miscarriages of justice—as well as the error in the carefully conducted and heavily scrutinized McVeigh case—should convince all Americans that the justice system that administers the death penalty is fatally flawed.