Opinion: Former prosecutor opposes Arizona death penalty

In September, Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike for her conviction of murdering a young woman 31 years ago. Over the course of more than an hour and the administration of a second dose of what should have brought her death with the first injection, Pike remained alive. The attempt to execute her was stopped and she was hospitalized in critical condition but has since been discharged to a rehabilitation center .

Arizona is no stranger to botched executions. In 2014, Arizona prison officials executed Joseph Wood in a horrific two-hour ordeal that saw officials injecting Wood multiple times while he snorted and snored, showing he was still alive. A year later, Arizona officials were caught trying to illegally import lethal injection drugs purchased from India when they could not obtain them in this country.

While Pike’s case is still being investigated, missed veins, degraded drugs or insufficient amounts of the drug are often the cause of botched attempts. These types of mistakes alone should cause us to revisit support for the death penalty. But there are other reasons.

While inmates on death row have been convicted of horrible murders, that fact is that other inmates serving life sentences have been convicted of murders just as heinous and cruel as those looking at executions. The difference between a life sentence or one of death is often based on what state and even county your crime was committed in, what color your skin is, how much money you have or who the prosecutor is.

Once a death sentence is imposed, it is rare that the sentence is carried out. In Arizona, since 1990, there have been just over 40 executions, even as hundreds of death sentences have been handed down over the past several decades. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a death penalty supporter, wrote in a Kansas case in 2006 almost two-thirds of all death sentences are reversed, mostly based on legal errors. While this reversal rate is high, according to many studies, states spend millions of dollars on each case as it winds through the legal system over years and often decades.

My own experience shows the problems with Arizona’s death penalty system. In my 40 years as a prosecutor I tried some 120 murder cases. Twenty of those resulted in death sentences imposed by a judge or jury. Most of the remaining received life sentences. Of those sentenced to death, two had their sentences carried out and six remain on appeal with two of those having been in litigation for over 30 years. Of the remaining 12, 11 have had their sentences reduced to life, and one is pending resentencing. These results are typical of the end results across the country. Scalia, while he still supported the death penalty, called the laws governing it, “incoherent.” Other Justices have called it “exceedingly complex” and “fraught with arbitrariness”.

While many people hold opinions based on their moral, philosophical or religious beliefs, when one looks at the practical issues of having the death penalty, it is easy to see that it is a flawed, arbitrary and, as Scalia wrote, incoherent system. The millions we spend, the number of botched attempts, the risk of wrongful conviction and the high percentage of cases that get turned back should cause us to revisit our laws in Arizona. Twenty-three states have abolished capital punishment. Arizona should join them.