The Foreign Service Journal, October 2003

of cases, defendants do indeed receive due process, thanks to a judicial system that Americans can confidently challenge their foreign critics to match in their own countries. (Whether a defendant has a good lawyer is another matter, unfortunately.) When a defendant goes into an American court for a capital crime, he’s guaranteed a lawyer. He can choose to be tried by either a jury or a judge. His or her defense attorney can chal- lenge 20 of those jurors without giving a reason why, while prosecutors can only strike 10 jurors. And most important of all, defendants are presumed innocent, so during the trial the state has to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Here in Maryland, we’ve made the process of getting a defendant on death row even more difficult. The state must prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant is indeed the person who com- mitted the murder, as opposed to being an accomplice. The state must then show there were aggravating circum- stances: the murder was com- mitted during a rape, robbery or other felony, or the victim was a police officer, for example. Nor is that all. Once those two things have been proven, jurors or the judge have to weigh any mitigat- ing factors in the defendant’s favor: his age, an abusive childhood, mental deficiencies (though this is usually done at the front end of the process when it’s deter- mined if the suspect is mentally competent to stand trial) and anything else a defense attorney may dredge up. Once all that’s done, the defendant still has the right to appeal when a death sentence is imposed. The con- victed has a right to apply for a post-conviction modifi- cation of sentence, at which time he can ask the judge to reduce his punishment. (All prisoners, whether on death row or not, have this right.) The prisoners on America’s death rows, no matter what may have gone wrong at their trials, did, indeed, get plenty of due process. The system is designed to make as certain as is humanly possible that innocent individuals aren’t exe- cuted. Anti-death penalty advocates in America and abroad who cite instances of innocents being released from death row say those cases are an indication that something is wrong with the system. But such instances are actually an example of what’s right with the system. That’s what the appeals process and post-conviction relief are for: to catch mistakes. In short, the picture many foreigners have of America as a reckless, gun-totin’, cowboy nation that hands out the death penalty willy-nilly is a false one. Yet they can’t be blamed for that. For it’s their allies here in America — the anti-death penalty crowd — who are all too happy to promote such nonsense. ■ F O C U S 42 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 3 Perhaps our foreign friends can be forgiven for not knowing that capital punishment is up to the states. Many Americans don’t know that, either.