DNA exonerations eroded public support for capital punishment.

Evidence

After peaking at 80% in 1994, support for it declined sharply (Saad, 2013). This drop was occasioned largely by reports of DNA evidence showing that innocent prisoners on death row were awaiting wrongful execution. Amnesty International USA has documented the faulty legal practices by which innocent people end up on death row. These include grossly incompetent defendant lawyering, misconduct by police and prosecutors, perjured testimony, racial prejudice, erroneous eyewitness testimony, and suppression of mitigating evidence (Amnesty International USA, n.d.). Death-row inmates in some of these cases were pardoned, others were acquitted on retrial, and still others saw the charges against them simply dropped. Review of evidence also has exonerated a number of innocent prisoners after they had been put to death. During the period when application of the death penalty was blatantly discriminatory, innocent people were probably executed at a higher rate. These executions raise fundamental questions about the morality of the death penalty. Unlike other penalties, the taking of human life is irrevocable. For some people, this irrevocability alone is enough reason for abolishing the death penalty. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1851

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the moral-disengagement mechanism studied elsewhere: here exposing wrongful executions disengages people FROM the death penalty by re-humanizing its victims.
• SEED: Article angle: ‘the morality of the irrevocable’ — why DNA overturned a 30-year consensus that neither deterrence studies nor equity arguments could.