| SOC’s Richard Stack tries to shift death penalty debate in new book BY MATT GETTY
Before focusing his efforts on teaching and the antideath penalty movement, SOC professor Richard Stack was the founding executive director of the Capital Area Community Food Bank. “I’ve always had a tendency to root for the underdog,” he says. |
Richard Stack can barely keep track of all the reasons he’s against the death penalty. Before he finishes arguing that it adds an unnecessary layer of violence to society, he’ll cite botched executions revealing capital punishment to be cruel and unusual, tackle the myth that it saves the state money, and question whether it deters crime. “I could go off on a lot of tangents on this,” says the School of Communication professor, cracking a wide grin that shows just how eager he is to debate the topic from any angle. Yet in his new book, Dead Wrong: Violence, Vengeance, and the Victims of Capital Punishment, Stack is most interested in a single, and surprisingly often overlooked, angle in the debate. “There are a lot of reasons to be opposed to the death penalty,” he says. “But there’s one that unites the political left and the political right, and that’s the innocence issue. Even if you’re an arch conservative, no one wants to see an innocent person executed.” By discussing how that has nearly happened more than 125 times, Stack doesn’t just want to change minds about the death penalty in Dead Wrong—he wants to change the debate itself. “I want to reframe the question,” he explains. “The traditional debate has been over whether capital punishment is a deterrent to crime, but that’s not really a viable question . . . It’s an unwinnable argument on either side, but as long as that’s the question we ask, it preserves the status quo. The new question—the question I want to ask—is ‘Can we trust our government to make such an irreversible, life-and-death decision, when the government screws up so much?’” After three years of research assisted by students in his public communication classes, Stack has found three major reasons for why the answer to that question is a resounding “no”—mistaken eyewitness testimony, racism and systemic corruption, and incompetent legal counsel. Rather than writing an academic study of these legal flaws, however, Stack crafted Dead Wrong around a single story for each. “I wanted to put a human face on this issue,” he explains. In the case of mistaken eye-witness testimony, Dead Wrong actually presents a story with two human faces. Through in-depth interviews, Stack tells the tale of Jennifer Thompson, a North Carolina college student determined to put the man who raped her behind bars, and Ronald Cotton, the innocent man who spent 11 years in prison because of her mistaken eyewitness
testimony. “She was a very intelligent woman, and she had the best intentions,” says Stack. “She was determined to keep her wits about her during the attack so that she could get as many glimpses at this guy as she could.” Yet she still identified the wrong man in a lineup, he explains, because police unknowingly encouraged her to focus on one suspect. Even after the real rapist incriminated himself two years into Cotton’s sentence by bragging about the rape in prison, Thompson failed to identify him as her rapist in court. It took nine more years before DNA evidence conclusively proved Cotton’s innocence. “It’s a remarkable story,” says Stack, “But this kind of thing happens more often than most people realize.” Though it wasn’t a capital case, Stack points out, Cotton’s story mirrors numerous death penalty trials in which eyewitness testimony has supported wrongful convictions. Dead Wrong’s second case study focuses on Ronald Pitts and Wilbert Lee, two African American Florida men who falsely confessed to a double murder after being beaten for hours by racist police in 1963. “Even after the sheriff heard that another man confessed to the murders, he didn’t care,” says Stack. “His response was, ‘I don’t care about that guy—I already got my two n-words.’” Here again, the innocent spent a decade on death row before numerous appeals finally freed them. Stack’s striking example of incompetent legal defense, Greg Wilhoit, lived for four years on Oklahoma’s death row for his estranged wife’s murder because of a single misidentified bite mark that his incompetent lawyer failed to refute. “He’d actually once been a good lawyer,” says Stack, “But by this time he was an alcoholic with brain damage who was known to have wet himself in the courtroom and vomited in the judge’s chambers.” After multiple appeals, more than 10 dental experts testified that the bite mark didn’t match Wilhoit’s teeth. Though this case may be extreme, Dead Wrong points out that it is by no means an exception. A Columbia University study, the book reports, revealed that during a 12-year span, states overturned more than 2,000 death sentences mainly because of incompetent legal counsel. Some death penalty proponents have argued that exonerations like those featured in Dead Wrong prove that the system actually works, but Stack is quick to point out the flaw in their logic. “In all these cases the system failed,” he says. “It was somebody from outside the system who took it upon themselves to rescue the innocent from death row.” In addition to these tales of exoneration, Dead Wrong details Illinois governor George Ryan’s controversial move to commute more than 160 death sentences to life without parole in 2003, examines the challenges the innocent face after exoneration, and gives voice to a population rarely heard from in the antideath penalty movement—victims’ families. The book’s afterward, which Stack sees as “the exclamation mark” on his argument, offers the perspective of Murder Victim Families for Reconciliation, a group that strongly opposes the death penalty despite having every reason to support it. “These are the people politicians point to when they beat their chest and say we need the death penalty,” says Stack. “But this group’s position is, ‘We don’t want it, and if you’re maintaining it for our benefit, you’re way off base.” Thanks to actions like Governor Ryan’s and Maryland governor Martin O’Malley’s recent offer to OK a death penalty ban if the legislature proposes one, Stack hopes politicians won’t be off base for much longer. “We’re not just Don Quixote tilting at windmills out here,” he says. “This is an issue where the politicians will follow public opinion, and that’s why I think communication is the most important tool . . . We’re eliminating the wall of the death penalty argument brick by brick. Some day we’ll look back at it the way the Europeans look at us now and ask, ‘How could we have been so barbaric?’” |
