Fighting irreversible error

From arrest to "the moment of death," how this nation executes the death penalty should be overhauled, concludes the bipartisan Constitution Project, a Washington-based legal research group made up of capital punishment supporters and opponents.
Release of the group's two-year, 217-page study comes just one week after Oklahoma killed a murderer in such a barbaric fashion as to offend the sensibilities of all but the most strident capital punishment advocates. Inmate Clayton Lockett writhed and gasped for 43 minutes before he died not from the drugs the state was administrating, but from what officials said was a heart attack.
That should not have happened; that should never happen again.
The Constitution Project makes 39 recommendations to overhaul capital punishment, including abolishing the use of the lethal drug cocktail used by Oklahoma and many of the other 31 death penalty states. Instead, a single drug protocol -- a large dose of a barbiturate -- should be used, panelists concluded. Texas, with the nation's most active death chamber, uses the single-drug protocol.
The panel's recommendations, however, call for changes beginning long before the condemned enters the death chamber. They range from how suspects are interrogated to how they are defended, and from how evidence is handled to what evidence can be considered on appeal (the complete report is available at http://www.constitutionproject.org/).
"Without substantial revisions — not only to lethal injection, but across the board — the administration of capital punishment in America is unjust, disproportionate and very likely unconstitutional," said committee member Mark Earley, who was a Republican attorney general of Virginia when the state carried out 36 executions.
 If we're going to insist on this sentence, then as Americans we are required to carry it out in adherence with the constitutional prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishment." That's true even for those among us who believe a murderer does not deserve a swift and painless death.
We also are required to make sure that every person condemned be judged guilty beyond any reasonable doubt and to a moral certainty. A recent study by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that at least 4 percent of death row inmates are likely to have been wrongfully convicted.
Recently there has been much hand-wringing in some political circles about alleged voter fraud, the demonstrated occurrence of which is considerably lower that even 1 percent. Forgetting the thinly veiled political reasons for this voter fraud fear-mongering, shouldn't we be more concerned about the possible miscarriage of justice that occurs when an innocent man or woman is executed?  That is a mistake which cannot be reversed.