Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, introducing Hannah Cox and she is from Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty and apparently they've been making some real progress here.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Thanks so much for having me.
So first of all, why would a conservative, much less an entire group full of them, be concerned about the death penalty?
Oh gosh, where to start?
I always get asked what's the main opposition conservatives have to the death penalty and there's no one answer.
There's a lot of reasons and people in our group tend to have one they feel more strongly about and some just are kind of overwhelmed by the problems with it.
But to begin with, the innocence issues are what really move a lot of people.
I think most people know there's been a number of wrongful convictions in our system, but most people aren't aware of just how many we've had.
To date, we've had one person exonerated from death row for every nine executions in this country.
So it's happening really frequently and the fact that we're catching these is not really a product of the system working.
It actually is typically due to the work of outside groups, typically working pro bono, coming along and really working to retest evidence and have new things introduced into the appellate process to prove innocence.
And so that's really scary.
It takes about 10 years on average for an innocence case to work its way through the system.
So it's not a quick process at all.
And so due to that and due to the limited amount of resources we have coming back through cases, there's no telling how many others we just haven't discovered yet.
And I think for people like me, one in nine is just unacceptable.
I think even risking one innocent life to a government is totally out of question for someone who believes in limited government.
So that's certainly what made me change my mind on it a number of years ago.
Another big problem for conservatives, though, are the costs.
The death penalty is the most expensive part of the system on a per offender basis.
And it's about $750,000 to $1 million more per case to carry out a death penalty case than it would be for life in prison without parole.
Now, most people will think that that's because the system takes so long.
That's typically what I hear, speed up the process.
Well, in reality, about 70% of the costs of the death penalty actually come from the trial alone.
The trial is about four times more expensive than the appellate process.
Otherwise, you would see life without parole and death penalty costs be pretty similar since most people who are sentenced to death actually still serve life without parole anyways.
Most people who are on death row end up dying of natural causes and not actually being executed.
But because the trial is so much more expensive, it is drastically more costly to carry out a death penalty case.
And that's not just wasteful, because we know the death penalty is not a deterrent, but it also is an opportunity cost.
That's money that we're not spending on programs that actually could work to deter crime, and it's not money that we're spending on actually solving more crimes, which we really do very little of in this country.
We only have about a 51% average clearance rate for homicides year in and year out.
So there's a lot of people who are having no justice whatsoever while we spend millions of dollars on a few sort of randomly selected death penalty cases.
So we were formed by a group of pro-life activists in Montana a number of years ago who were conservative and felt very strongly in their pro-life views and thought that that should be applied from birth all the way through the natural death of a person.
So we've seen a lot of people rally around that.
And then once you get past those issues, just looking at who gets the death penalty is really highly problematic.
I think most people assume that it's for the worst of the worst.
Ted Bundy's name or someone like that is usually brought up to me.
But if you really start digging into who gets it, you'll find that it's highly arbitrary.
It really comes down to the location where the crime is committed.
About 2% of the nation's counties actually bring the majority of death penalty cases.
And since reinstatement in the late 70s, all of our executions have come from less than 16% of the nation's counties.
So that's the driving force determining who actually is getting these sentences and who isn't.
And that's followed by a person's ability to afford good representation.
Oftentimes people who get the death penalty are simply people who can't afford good representation.
A lot of them have had public defenders who were overburdened with a number of cases.
Some had public defenders that were later disbarred or disciplined.
Many were sentenced before the formation of indigent defense funds in this country.
And so when you actually start looking into these cases, you'll be really surprised at who's there.
And I think many people are recognizing that it's not who we thought is there.
Many people such as BTK or Jeffrey Dahmer or even one of the 9-11 conspirators who people would probably form consensus around agreeing that those are some of the worst of the worst crimes that we've seen, those are not people that got the death penalty.
And instead, you'll often find people who had psychosis, severe mental illness problems, many veterans, and people who were just really vulnerable.
So I think all of those things combine and have led people to recognize this is a failed big government program.
Like so many others, it has all of the error and ineffectiveness that we so often see in government.
That's why we're limited government activists.
And it's really not something that's consistent with conservative values.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so we're going to talk about all this progress you've been making.
And this must mean with conservative Republican legislatures and governorships across the country, if you're having success, because by far the Republican the Republican Party dominates on the state level there.
But I want to go back over this one thing that you mentioned there about such a small number of counties.
In other words, such a small number of prosecutors who really decide that their death penalty prosecutors are behind such a gigantic percentage of the actual death penalty convictions and sentences.
It sort of raises all kinds of questions about the rule of law at all.
If it's really that much discretion is in play on questions that large, you know what I mean?
Where it's, is the cop going to give a guy a jaywalking ticket or not?
That's the kind of discretion where, yeah, sure.
Fine.
And especially if it's in favor of the civilian, eh, go ahead.
You're all right.
Just be careful.
Versus the kind of discretion where this one DA in this one county, which, hey, I'm in Texas.
There's like, I don't know, two or 300 counties in Texas or something.
I don't even know.
There are plenty of counties I've never even heard of.
And you're telling me that you could just have one prosecutor there that boy, he loves giving people the death penalty, him and the judge.
And boy, do they do it all the time.
And it just seems kind of out of whack to, I guess what the common understanding would be about how this works.
Yeah, it's a great point.
I think many people are unaware of just how much power district attorneys have in this country.
And a lot of them are elected and people aren't paying very close attention to what they're doing.
And they hold a tremendous amount of influence, not only over how the laws are applied and how we proceed with sentencing and the criminal justice system, but also on the legislative process.
Many of them are very active in lobbying and heavily weigh into the legislative process and push for more laws or new laws or push against reforms such as like what I work on.
And so I think it's a good thing for people to be aware of just how much they get to decide in this situation.
And it's true that most of them in this nation have determined that this is a really expensive process.
It puts an extreme amount of weight on the system that then it's a burden to solving more cases or prosecuting more cases, or for people defending cases when you look at the public defender's office, and that the cost is simply not worth it.
Because again, you're not getting a deterrent effect for the death penalty when you look into the data.
Regions of the country and states that use it the most always correlate with having much higher rates of violent crime, whereas regions that do not use it or get rid of it and states specifically that repeal it either see no difference in their violent crime rate or even sometimes see a dip in their violent crime rate, which I would argue is due to having more resources freed up towards using in programs that actually could work to combat crime in the first place.
And so when you're looking at that and recognizing that you're not getting anything for this money and that you could be doing things that would actually increase public safety outcomes or give more justice to more victims, I think it becomes pretty clear for most people that the death penalty isn't a very sensible thing to proceed with.
And then you have a couple really overzealous people who kind of try to hang their hat on it and typically maybe try to use it as a way to climb the political ladder.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Soon to be governor, whoever the prosecutor is working his way up there.
And which goes to show the responsibility of the people too, that if that's what the people want, if that's what continues to be successful campaign sloganeering, then they'll keep using it and keep running on it.
And then on the other hand, if they get the idea, especially that conservatives are over this and don't believe in it, think of it, as you said, as just another failed government program, big surprise that they can't get this right.
Then that can really mean a lot.
You attack the right from the right out conservative, the conservatives on something like this, rather than somehow moving left or being liberal on this, making it a very kind of conservative and right wing and constitutionalist kind of a point, as, as you said to on spending as well, that just doesn't make sense for all those kinds of reasons.
You know, get the, get that idea out there more and more popularized that, Hey, actually a great many conservatives are concerned about the death penalty.
And just, as you said to on the issue of fairness, I can never stop making this anecdote plain.
And people ask me about it all the time too.
It's a real story where when I was a cab driver back in say 98 or 99 or something, I had an assistant DA from Harris County, Texas, that's Houston in my cab.
And she told me that they had a slogan down there at the DA's office, not her, of course, or, you know, her best friend or whatever, but all the rest of them though.
And what they said was, if they really didn't do it, they'll get out on appeal.
And then, so what that meant was anyone, the cops bring them, they nail them to the wall and that they don't even stop to question whether they really are guilty or really did it or not.
They see whether they can get a conviction, simple as that.
And then, you know, what?
Yeah.
Innocent people get caught up in that all the time.
And you've got to figure Harris County, people are in and out of there all day long.
And mostly in that.
Yeah.
There's this huge margin of innocent people caught up in it, but don't worry once they're in prison and they have no ability to make money to hire a lawyer.
And the preponderance of the evidence is on them to show not even that they're innocent, but that somehow they were wrongly convicted because some science was ignored or some perjury was suborned or because a judge knowingly and obviously broke a major rule in instructing the jury or some kind of thing like that, where innocence is actually no defense.
Once you've been convicted, it's not even part of it necessarily.
Maybe unless some new science has been developed and some old evidence can be retested or something like that, but otherwise you're done.
And, but that's their attitude.
It has nothing to do with the mandate of seeking justice at all.
Their job is flipping burgers and getting them out the window.
And that's frankly terrifying because as I briefly mentioned, that's a completely erroneous view of how the appellate process works.
The appellate process is not going back in and looking for new evidence.
They're not looking to retest evidence.
They're not looking for issues of innocence whatsoever.
The appellate process is merely making sure that rules were followed.
It's looking at procedural issues.
Were there Brady violations?
Were there issues with the jury?
Things of this nature.
They're not coming in and doing this as a new trial.
And so even when there is new evidence to be tested, it can be extremely difficult to have it entered into the appellate process.
There's one case in Nashville, Tennessee, where the guy was executed in 2006.
There's been serious innocence issues around the case all along.
There was new evidence discovered before he was executed.
His attorneys were really pushing to have it tested.
And basically the prosecution was able to prevent that from happening.
And so now there's another push to have that examined posthumously and see if we executed an innocent person.
But just because there even is new evidence to be tested does not mean that it happens in the appellate process.
And so to believe that just because there's somebody who's innocent would get off during the appellate process is complete hogwash.
And I think you'd have to know that if you work close to the legal system.
Yeah.
Well, they do know it, right?
And they don't care.
That's just the deal.
That was why she denied that she ever said that or agreed with that, but it is true about the rest of them.
And think about what that means, that that's a saying, not just that, you know, that's a way of sort of paraphrasing how they feel about it.
That's a figure of speech there.
If they really didn't do it, they'll get out on appeal.
This is repeated back and forth between these people over and over again.
You know, like terrorism is a small price to pay for being a superpower, something like that.
Anyway.
And then there was one thing, too, I wanted to point out about what you said about the costs and people assuming that, well, that's because all the appeals process.
Well, if you're going to cut costs on that, you're just going to convict more and more innocent people and take away, even though, as you said, the appeals ain't all they're cracked up to be in the first place.
You're going to limit even that.
And so people who are wrongly convicted should have even less chance to get out because of the cost of keeping them there when the obvious solution is just to give them life without parole.
And that was actually a big deal here in Texas that they kind of refused for, I guess, generations or all along, maybe to even have life without parole as an option in order to incentivize for the death penalty that you don't want to take the risk that this guy's going to get paroled after a few years, not after what he's done.
So you got to give them the needle.
And it was only just a few years ago that they gave life without parole as an option here.
Yeah, and that's true across the country.
We also, you know, many states did not have life without parole until the turn of the new millennium.
And we have seen since that has become pretty much across the board an option since 2000, new death sentences are down 60 percent.
And so when juries are given the option to go with something less than execution, they are picking that oftentimes.
We've even had several jurors come out from trials that took place in the 80s and 90s and say, you know, we didn't want to have him executed.
We were told that we didn't really use executions.
You know, a lot of the states weren't really carrying them out.
And so they were told this is just a sure way to make sure that someone they thought could be ongoingly violent would not be released back into society.
But had they had the opportunity to use life without parole, they would have gone for that instead.
And so I think that's a great point.
That luckily has been a bit of an arguing chip taken away from them.
And we're seeing that people don't go for it.
We're also just seeing a real downturn in opinion towards the death penalty since the height of popularity in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
You know, we have 25 states who have done away with it in some capacity.
Twenty one have gotten rid of it legislatively.
Four others either have judicial or executive moratoriums on it.
And of the 25 that do still have it, over a third of them have not used it in a decade or more.
Last year was the fourth in a row the country carried out fewer than 30 executions.
And there were 25, I believe, and all of those came from only eight states, with more than half coming out of Texas alone.
So not only is usage down, it's really heavily concentrated.
And a recent Gallup poll found that nearly 50 percent of Americans do not believe the death penalty is being applied fairly.
And I think that that is something that's occurring in the age of information.
People are getting to see behind the curtains of the criminal justice system in a way they never have before, through the popularity of true crime and just through the ease of access to information through the Internet.
And people are recognizing the system's not functioning the way they were taught that it should and that they thought that it was.
And so you're really seeing a backlash towards that.
I think that will continue.
Yeah.
All right.
So let's talk about that.
You have this new report out called The Right Way.
More Republican lawmakers are championing death penalty repeal.
Yeah, that's right.
So when we first started looking at this data, we were examining from 2000 on and back in 2000, it was really very rare to see a Republican mention this issue, much less sponsor a piece of legislation to repeal the death penalty.
We went national with our organization in 2013.
We found that by 2016, that number of Republican lawmakers had more than doubled.
Now it has increased 10 times the amount of Republicans are sponsoring pieces of repeal legislation.
In 2019 alone, we've had 11 states with Republican sponsored bills to repeal the death penalty.
One of those was successful in New Hampshire, where they actually overrode the governor's veto by one vote in each chamber.
So Republicans were the final piece in that that pushed across the finish line and they got rid of the death penalty.
We saw Wyoming, which is a very red state, almost pass death penalty repeal and fall only a couple votes short of that.
They passed it through their house and fell only, I think, two or three votes short in their Senate.
And so a lot of momentum is happening around that.
We're seeing that this is something that not only is the public supporting, but that it's at a point where in the culture, lawmakers feel they can champion this issue without reproach on the conservative side.
So we really see a lot of movement when it comes to this.
We've seen people running for office as Republicans and announcing their anti-death penalty in the primary phase of their candidacy and still winning.
We saw two Republican US Senate candidates win their races the past year after having already announced in the primary phase and being attacked for it that they were anti-death penalty.
We've seen people running on a Republican ticket for governorships announcing this.
And so there's a lot of emboldenment happening.
And I think that it's because they're recognizing that people are for this.
And that's typically what you see with legislators and lawmakers.
I always say it takes about 10 years for them to catch up to where the public is.
And so the fact that they're at this point really shows you how far we've moved as a society on this.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I just saw a thing last week, I think last week about opinions about, oh, I know it was a reason about the FBI and how after I think Russiagate was a big part of it.
And, you know, for that matter, on both sides of the election of 2016 and all of this, and that as a consequence, that now convictions in federal court have dropped by a couple of percentage points sort of across the board as a reflection of that loss in confidence.
So that really is the point we are just talking about cops here.
A lot of times they don't know the difference between inductive and deductive logic.
And a lot of times they lie on the stand or don't know what the hell they're talking about.
And a lot of times innocent people go to prison.
And you know what we see all the time where innocent people get sprung from prison after sitting in there for decades, but hey, at least they get to die at home, you know, as opposed to getting executed for a crime they didn't commit, which I don't know all the details.
I read a couple of articles on both sides of this case.
I'm not really sure, but there was a real debate about the last execution here in Texas, just what, six or eight weeks ago about this guy and whether he really had done this crime or not.
And so he might've been convicted beyond a reasonable doubt at the moment, but I don't think anyone would argue that he definitely did it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
It was certainly disputable whether he had done it, you know?
Yeah.
And I think, you know, when we look at the amount of wrongful convictions, like I mentioned earlier, one in nine have been exonerated from death row.
That's an extra step in the process of really proving- I mean, that's a huge number.
Think about that, what that means when you multiply that out.
Or can you tell me that's how many hundreds or thousands of people across the country?
It's about a hundred and seven, approaching 170 people.
We've carried about, about 1500 executions since reinstatement.
So of those, about 170 have been exonerated.
Now that's exonerated.
Like I said, that's an extra- And that's over what period of time?
Over about 35, 40 years.
Okay.
But that's not to mention the other people who have been released from death row for potential innocence issues.
So I just want to point out there's a difference in exoneration.
That's an extra burden in the legal system to really prove, go in and have your record cleared, you're exonerated.
There's been many, many other people who have been released over potential innocence issues from the death penalties rows that were not fully exonerated, but maybe they took Alford pleas, which is something where you maintain your innocence, but recognize that there were to be a new trial, you could be convicted again.
And so the system says, we don't want to have a new trial.
And you say, me either.
And so you take an Alford plea and you're released, but you're not fully exonerated.
Or you have many other people who've had their trials overturned or reversed because of potential innocence issues or because of procedural issues, and they've been released.
You also have about 870 something people who have been wrongfully convicted and charged with homicide, but just happened to not get the death penalty, which like I mentioned, given the arbitrariness of who gets death penalty, who doesn't, it's pretty random, but we've had even more innocence issues discovered if you go past the exoneration number.
So one out of nine is shocking and should be, but it's actually even bigger than that.
And I think a lot of people think that that's because it was before DNA, that gets brought up all the time.
Like now we have forensic science and this wouldn't happen anymore, which is also total hogwash.
If you look at a lot of these exonerations, they're from convictions that occurred post 2000.
And the reality is we still only have DNA evidence available in about 10% or less of cases.
So it's not as widely available as shows like CSI and Law and Order lead people to believe.
And even when it is present, there's been a lot of problems with it.
It's been responsible.
The misapplication of it has been responsible and about 45% of wrongful convictions we've discovered thus far.
So again, you have bad practices that are later debunked like microscopic care analysis or bite mark evidence that were once said to be foolproof and scientific and now are known to be just junk science.
They're not allowed to be used anymore, but they were used to convict a lot of people.
You have other things where they're not using full portions of the DNA sample.
They don't have full portions.
And so they're comparing much lower percentages of the sample and you're getting results that are not nearly as solid as you would if you had a full sample.
You have a lot of contamination issues in labs.
You've had labs that are paid based off of conviction levels.
So they're incentivized to produce results for the prosecution instead of just finding the truth.
You've had lab technicians out and out lie on the stand about the evidence.
So I think a lot of people feel secure nowadays because of DNA and in no way should they.
It's a tool.
It can be a useful tool, but it is something that should be considered alongside all the other evidence.
We also have about 70% of wrongful convictions involving misidentification by an eyewitness.
So I've had many people who've served on juries who've said, I felt comfortable convicting because this guy saw him do it.
You can't get more clear than that.
Well, you really can, because people's memories are not as solid as they think they are.
And especially when you're talking about identification across races, we see a lot of people misidentifying others and thinking they saw someone do something when it turns out to be somebody totally different.
So there's all kinds of things that can go wrong.
Of course, there are issues with investigation techniques and Brady violations on the prosecutor side.
You do have qualified immunity for both of those two parties, and that's problematic.
You also have the use of jailhouse informants, which are, of course, have an incentive to lie and give information that could be biased or in some ways swayed.
So there's all sorts of things that go into leading to wrongful convictions.
There's also just the fact that our public defender's offices are swamped.
A lot of them don't have the resources that they need.
They sometimes are handling hundreds of cases at once.
They don't have the same resources to test evidence or to pay for expert testimony.
And so there's a real David and Goliath sort of situation occurring in the justice system where people are given an attorney, but that doesn't mean they're given great representation.
And it's not because we don't have great public defenders in this country.
We do, but we're not giving them the tools that they need to be successful or to really provide a quality defense.
And so all of that combines and really makes the risk of a wrongful conviction quite high.
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You know, it's interesting what you mentioned about the TV shows regarding how the evidence is used, where, you know, I think poor old Andy Griffith would have never really suspected that Matlock would actually serve such a negative purpose in this society of making people believe that essentially that's how it works, and the truth will out, and the lawyer will get the real culprit to admit it on the stand, and the prosecutor will be more than happy to drop the charges now that this new evidence has come to light.
And that's just how it works.
And then on the other side you have the CSI guys where, oh look, a hair, and all of a sudden they have a foolproof case.
And I always like on Law & Order, they get it wrong for the first six minutes, but then after that they figure it out and always get the right guy.
And that stuff can be really powerful for how a juror imagines this evidence must have been developed.
They're picturing scenes from the TV show, you know?
We have a CSI effect in the system where they know that when a jury is presented with DNA evidence, they're almost always likely to convict because they just have so much faith in it because of these TV shows, and have so much faith in the testimony of people working in the legal process to always, you know, be the good guy who really is concerned with justice.
And the reality is, it's not always the case, but also the reality is that humans are fallible.
You know, I don't think that every cop who is involved in leading to a wrongful conviction, or every prosecutor who prosecutes a case ends up being a wrongful conviction, is a bad guy who doesn't care about justice and thinks that, you know, there might be a chance of doing wrong.
I think there's a lot of people who really think they're doing the right thing, and who really strongly believe that this is the person, and you've got a lot of confirmation bias occurring around you, and you get really bought into this.
And I think it's really hard to ask humans to be perfect, but because of that, that's why we should not have the death penalty.
We know that our system will never be foolproof enough to where we should feel comfortable as a government allowing this to occur.
Yeah.
All right, you guys.
Well, check out this great new piece.
It's at conservativesconcerned.org.
It's called The Right Way.
More Republican lawmakers are championing death penalty repeal.
This might be some good propaganda for you to share with your local conservative Republican lawmakers.
And that is Hannah Cox.
Thank you very much for your time on the show.
Thank you so much.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
