One of the nation's leading criminologists and most-cited experts on the death penalty, Michael Radelet, has joined the sociology department at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Radelet comes to CU-Boulder from the University of Florida, where he taught for more than 20 years and served as chair of the sociology department for the last five years. He has researched and published extensively on how the death penalty is applied in the United States.
Americans' support for the death penalty peaked in 1994-95 but has declined in recent years, Radelet said. Colorado is one of 38 states that allow capital punishment.
"The more people know about the death penalty the more likely they are to oppose it," he said.
A recent poll found 63 percent of Americans support the death penalty, but that support declines significantly when people are given the option of a sentence of life without the possibility of parole, he said. When given a choice between the two sentences, public opinion is almost evenly split.
Radelet believes the evidence clearly shows the death penalty should be abolished. His own research, covering cases from 1900 to 1985, has found that at least 23 people have been executed for crimes they did not commit, and that racial and economic disparities prove the penalty is unfairly applied.
"The main determinant of who is on death row is the quality of the attorney representing the defendant," he said.
Radelet praised Colorado for having some of the very best public defenders in the United States handling death penalty trials and appeals. Defendants in some other states are not as fortunate, he noted.
More than 7,000 people have been executed in the United States since 1900, according to research conducted by Radelet. The United States and Japan are the only industrialized countries that still apply the death penalty, and Japan rarely uses it.
"Even if one concedes, for the sake of argument, that some people like Timothy McVeigh deserve to die, we run into all sorts of problems drawing the line between who deserves to live and who deserves to die," he said. "At the end of the day, we make so many mistakes in making those decisions that the only clear lesson is that we do not deserve to kill."
Radelet has personally worked with each of the last 50 people who were executed in Florida. He is scheduled to release the results of a new study on Sept. 7, funded by the Florida Bar Association, that examines issues of race and the declining number of death sentences issued in the state.
He also has been hired to do research for a commission studying the death penalty in Illinois. After a dozen people sentenced to death in that state were discovered to be innocent, the governor declared a moratorium on executions and established a commission to study the death penalty.
Radelet is examining death sentences in Illinois in terms of race, gender and geographic location. He is studying what distinguishes the 170 people on death row in Illinois from the thousands of others convicted of murder in that state who were not sentenced to death. The commission is scheduled to release its report by Nov. 1.
Last week, an Idaho man who had been on death row for 18 years was released after a state judge dismissed the charges against him on the basis of DNA tests. He became the 97th inmate in the United States who has been released from death row since 1973 after it was discovered that they were not guilty, Radelet said.
"Convicting the innocent shows the fallibility of every decision-maker on the road to the death chamber: from politician to prosecutor to jury to judge," he wrote earlier this year. "It shows we make godlike decisions without godlike skills."
Radelet will teach undergraduate classes on criminology and a graduate seminar on the death penalty. His undergraduate students will be researching the history of the death penalty in Colorado, and will be documenting the types of offenses for which people in Colorado have been executed and the race and ethnic characteristics of the defendants and victims.
Radelet will speak to the Boulder Rotary Club on Sept. 4 and to the Colorado Public Defenders Association in Snowmass on Sept. 29.