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Since 1976, there have been over seven hundred executions in the United States.

The top execution-happy states are:

Texas (248 executions—nearly one-third of all U.S. executions since 1976) Virginia (82) Florida (51) Missouri (50) Oklahoma (43) Louisiana (26) South Carolina (25) Arkansas (24) Alabama (23) Arizona (22) North Carolina (17) Delaware (13) Illinois (12) California (9) Nevada (9) Indiana (8) Utah (6)

A shocking recent death penalty study of 4,578 cases in a twenty-three-year period (1973-1995) concluded that the courts found serious, reversible error in nearly 7 of every 10 capital sentence cases that were fully reviewed during the period, It also found that death sentences were being overturned in 2 out of 3 appeals. The overall prejudicial review error rate was 68 percent.

Since 1973, some ninety-five death row inmates have been fully exonerated by the courts—that is, found innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced to die. Ninety-six persons have been released as a result of DNA testing.

And what were the most common errors?

1. Egregiously incompetent defense lawyers who didn’t even look for, or missed important evidence that would have proved innocence or demonstrated that their client didn’t deserve to die.

2. Police or prosecutors who did discover that kind of evidence but suppressed it, actively derailing the judicial process.

In half the years studied, including the most recent one, the error rate was over 60 percent. High error rates exist across the country. In 85 percent of death penalty cases the error rates are 60 percent or higher. Three-fifths have error rates of 70 percent or higher.

Catching these errors takes time—a national average of nine years from death sentence to execution. In most cases, death row inmates wait years for the lengthy review procedures needed to uncover all these errors—whereupon their death sentences are very often reversed. This imposes a terrible cost on taxpayers, victims’ families, the judicial system, and the wrongly condemned.

Among the inmates involved in the study who had their death verdicts overturned, nearly all were given a sentence less than death (82 percent), and many were found innocent on retrial (7 percent).

The number of errors has risen since 1996, when President Clinton made it tougher for death row inmates to prove their innocence by signing into law a one-year limit on the time inmates have to appeal to federal courts after exhausting their appeals in state courts. In light of the study that proved how many of these inmates are either innocent or not legally deserving of the death penalty, this attempt to curb their appeals was simply outrageous.

We are one of the few countries in the world that puts to death both the mentally retarded and juvenile offenders. The United States is among only six countries that impose the death penalty on juveniles. The others are Iran, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen.

The United States is also the only country besides Somalia that has not signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Why? Because it contains a provision prohibiting the execution of children under eighteen, and we want to remain free to execute our children.

No other industrialized nation executes its children.

Even China prohibits the death penalty for those under eighteen—this from a country that has shown an intolerable lack of respect for human rights.

Currently the total number of death row inmates in the United States tops 3,700. Seventy of those death row inmates are minors (or were when they committed their crime).

But our Supreme Court doesn’t find it cruel and unusual punishment (in the terms of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) to execute those who were sixteen years old when they committed a capital crime. This despite the fact that same court has ruled that sixteen-year-olds do not have “the maturity or judgment” to sign contracts.

Odd, isn’t it, that a child’s diminished capacity