from impulse rather than judgment." From the days of slavery in which black people were considered property, through the years of lynching and Jim Crow laws, capital punishment has always been deeply affected by race. Unfortunately, the days of racial bias in the death penalty are not a remnant of the past", says Robert C. Watters of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. Fairness requires that people who break the same law under similar circumstances must meet with the same punishment, however the justice system is in no way consistent. Statistics show that a black man who kills a white person is eleven times more likely to receive the death penalty than a white man who kills a black person! Blacks who kill blacks have even less to worry about. The fourth debate is the danger of mistake. In the past, many people have beenwrongfully executed for crimes that they did not commit, all by the name of justice. It has happened that after the execution of the alleged guilty party, the real murderer had confessed to free his guilty conscience. "No matter how careful courts are, the possibility of perjured testimony, mistaken honest testimony, and human error remain all too real. We have no way of judging how many innocent persons have been executed, but we can be certain there were some, Watters says. The unique thing about the death penalty is that it is final and irreversible. Since 1970, almost eighty people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. Researchers Michael L. Radelet andHugo Adam Bedau found twenty three cases since 1900 where innocent people were executed, and the numbers are still growing. Stories like that of Rolando Cruz, released after ten years on Illinois's death row, despite the fact that another man had confessed to the crime shortly after his conviction, and that of Ricardo Aldape Guerra, who returned to Mexico after fifteen years on Texas's death row because of a ...
