Death Penalty Facts

The decision whether to abolish capital punishment in Oregon belongs to voters. Neither the passage of Senate Bill 1013 in 2019 nor the Oregon Supreme Court decision earlier this month in the David Bartol case took the decision whether to retain or abolish the death penalty away from Oregonians, despite this newspaper’s recent editorial (“The death penalty debate voters didn’t get to have,” Oct. 10). That editorial reflects a shocking failure to understand what it means to live in a representative and constitutional democracy. The people are owed a correction.

Public Support for Death Penalty Drops to 45-Year Low as Four More Death-Row Prisoners Exonerated in 2017   

Innocence and Mistakes:(revised 2/6/13) At the time they were convicted, some more than once, the juries had no reasonable doubt that they were guilty. Some were re-sentenced two or three times before evidence of their innocence was found. As of January 2012 none of those who have been sentenced to death in Oregon since 1984, when the current death penalty law was passed, have yet been found to be innocent. However, we have come perilously close.

Academic and professional researchers and institutions over the years have disagreed on this subject. In 2012, the National Academies National Research Council, the most respected independent research organization in the land, examined three decades of research and concluded that the research is not useful. “The committee concludes that resarch to date on the effect of captial punishment on homicide is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increrases or has no effect on homicide rates”.