Fifty three death row inmates were executed in the US last year while today about 3,350 languish on death row. There they will typically spend over a decade awaiting execution. Some have been there for well over two decades, and last weekend, after 25 years on Alabama's death row, the latest to be put to death was Darrell Grayson. As Denis Staunton reports harrowingly in WeekendReview today, he met his death by lethal injection just hours after the state governor and the US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal to be able to use DNA testing, not available at the time of his alleged offence, to clear his name.
Grayson confessed before his trial to the gruesome rape and murder of an 86-year-old woman when he was 19. It was a horrendous crime but of which he insisted from the start he had no recollection, being drunk out of his mind at the time. His lawyer, who had practised till then only in the divorce courts, had only $500 to spend on expert witnesses. Since then attempts to reopen the case to consider significant new alibi and DNA evidence have failed. The governor ruled that DNA testing was not pertinent as the capital element of his offence related to the murder, not the rape.
Whether he was guilty or not, Grayson's case raises many of the familiar lacunae in the barbaric US death penalty system: race - almost half of Alabama's 195 death row inmates are black, even though African-Americans make up only a quarter of the state's population; access by the indigent to an adequate legal defence; delay - the House of Lords (in a Caribbean case) ruled in 1993 that it was "inhumane and degrading" to hang anyone who had spent more than five years on death row, amounting to double punishment; and the refusal of many state courts to reopen cases when faced with exculpatory evidence - DNA evidence has in recent years cleared 15 innocent death row inmates.
But the climate is changing. A 2006 Gallup poll has found a growing loss of confidence in the death penalty in the US - a declining, though substantial, majority of Americans still support capital punishment, but a small majority would now prefer imprisonment without possibility of parole as an alternative. Most Americans believe that innocent people have been executed, that the death penalty is not a deterrent, and that a moratorium on executions should be applied.
Last week Rwanda abolished the death penalty. The decision was not easy, as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour observed: "A country that has suffered the ultimate crime and whose people's thirst for justice is still far from quenched has decided to forgo a sanction that should have no place in any society that claims to value human rights and the inviolability of the person." Yet, in 2006, according to Amnesty, although 90 states have abolished it, there were 1,591 judicially sanctioned executions globally, 91 per cent of them in six countries: China, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Sudan and the US. It is a club of death that demeans our shared humanity.