We may execute an innocent person.

• Between 1973 and November 2006, over 120 death row inmates from twenty-two states have been released as innocent. (2006 Death Penalty Information Center, www.deathpenaltyinfo.org)

The death penalty discriminates against racial minorities and the poor.

• In 82% of the studies (reviewed nationwide) race of the victim was found to influence the likelihood of being charged with capital murder or receiving the death penalty. (U.S. General Accounting Office, Death Penalty Sentencing, Feb. 1990)
• Nation-wide, about 84% of the victims in death penalty cases are white, even though only 50% of the murder victims are white. (NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 9/1/1999)
• Persons nation-wide executed for interracial murders from 1976 - 12/13/1999: White Defendant / Black Victim - 11, Black Defendant / White Victim - 141. (NAACP Legal Defense Fund, 9/1/1999)
• Nation-wide approximately 90% of those on death row could not afford to hire a lawyer when they were tried. (Tabak, in Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review 1989)
• A Justice Department report revealed that 80% of the cases submitted by federal prosecutors for death penalty review in the past five years have involved racial minorities as defendants. In more than half of those cases, the defendant was African-American. The report also found that 40% of the 682 cases sent to the Justice Department for approval to seek the death penalty were filed by only five jurisdictions. "I can't help but be both personally and professionally disturbed by the numbers that we discuss today," said Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder. "[N]o one reading this report can help but be disturbed, troubled, by this disparity." (New York Times, 9/12-13/00)
• Two out of the three men executed in Nebraska (66%) since 1973 have been African American.

The death penalty is many times more expensive than life without parole.

• "Two recent studies - one from N. Carolina and one from Kansas - indicate that the availability of the death penalty as a sentencing option adds significant financial costs to a state’s criminal justice system... It is significant that, although the costs were broken down in slightly different ways, these two studies both found an annual additional expense for death penalty cases of four million dollars." (Legislative Research Division, "Cost of the Death Penalty: An Introduction to the Issue," Nebraska Legislature (1995), p. 23)

The death penalty is not a deterrent.

• "A survey of experts from the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Law & Society Assn. Showed that the overwhelming majority did not believe that the death penalty is a proven deterrent to homicide. Over 80% believe the existing research fails to support a deterrence justification for the death penalty. Similarly over 75% of those polsled do not believe that increasing the number of executions or decreasing the time spent on death row before execution would produce a general deterrent effect." (M. Radelet and R. Akers, Deterrence and the Death Penalty: The Views of the Experts, 1995)

Execution as a social policy makes our society more violent.

• A new survey by the New York Times found that states without the death penalty have lower homicide rates than states with the death penalty. The Times reports that ten of the twelve states without the death penalty have homicide rates below the national average, whereas half of the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above. During the last 20 years, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty has been 48% - 101% higher than in states without the death penalty. "I think Michigan made a wise decision 150 years ago," said the state's governor, John Engler, a Republican, referring to the state's abolition of the death penalty in 1846. "We're pretty proud of the fact that we don't have the death penalty." (New York Times, 9/22/00)

Nebraska's Death Penalty Study disclosed several inequities. Click here to learn more.