Following is an excerpt from Mr. Cannon's story on the death penalty, outlining his argument against capital punishment. Click here for the full text version.

onservatives were rightly appalled when O. J. Simpson was acquitted after a screwy trial tainted by the defense’s overtly racial appeals to the jury. But the moral of this story is not that black jurors will no longer convict black defendants (of the 3,652 people on Death Row, 43 percent are black), it’s that juries make mistakes all the time. And sometimes — nobody knows how often — the mistakes they make are in the other direction: They convict innocent people.

In the years since Steven T. Judy was electrocuted, some 82 condemned people have had their capital-murder convictions set aside for one reason or another. A few, such as Steven Manning, a corrupt Chicago cop, didn’t get a fair trial but may have been guilty and are serving time for other crimes in which their guilt is unquestioned. But many more are like poor Kirk Bloodsworth, an ex-Marine from the Eastern Shore of Maryland who had no previous criminal record — and no involvement whatsoever in the crime for which he was convicted and sentenced to death. These men are released after years on Death Row with a pardon or a halfhearted apology by the state and, if they are lucky, an inadequate monetary settlement.

“I was separated from my family and branded the worst thing possible — a child-killer and a rapist,” said Bloodsworth on his release. “It can happen to anyone.”

In eight of these cases, including Bloodsworth’s, DNA evidence not previously available was used to free the condemned. Inevitably someone on the prosecution’s side will mumble bromides about how this proves that the system “works.” But that’s not what it proves. These DNA cases underscore a few basic points that are far from reassuring: What about the majority of cases — the non-rape cases, mostly — in which DNA is irrelevant? Why do so many state prosecutors tout DNA as much stronger evidence than fingerprints when it points to guilt, but then put up roadblocks for defendants who want to use it to establish their innocence? Finally, how many innocent people were executed in the years before DNA tests became available?

This is the crux of the matter, and no one seems to have the answer. Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush was asked directly how he could be certain that all 120-odd executions he has presided over as governor of Texas were carried out against guilty defendants. He replied that he was, indeed, certain that nothing like what had happened in Illinois had happened in Texas on his watch. “Maybe they’ve had some problems in their courts,” he said. “Maybe they’ve had some faulty judgments. I’ve reviewed every case, . . . and I’m confident that every case that has come across my desk, I’m confident of the guilt of the person who committed the crime.”

Incidentally, Bush’s brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, says the same thing, even though Florida has set aside the capital-murder convictions of some 20 Death Row inmates since 1973 — more than any other state. Gerald Kogan, the former chief justice of Florida’s Supreme Court, entered the debate recently, saying he’s convinced that Florida has, in fact, put to death people who were not guilty. “Knowing as I do the imperfections in our system, I know that we have, on occasions in the past, executed those people who are in fact innocent,” Kogan said at a Capitol Hill press conference. This led, in turn, to a challenge from Jeb Bush that Kogan name names. This is a fair point, but present-day Florida officials hardly seem preoccupied with ensuring that only the guilty are put to death. When Gov. Ryan was imposing his moratorium, the legislature in Tallahassee was in special session passing a law reducing the time convicted murderers have to appeal their cases or bring new evidence to light.

If Republican governors are at odds with one another over the issue, so too are conservatives generally. In recent weeks, Pat Robertson, George Will, and William F. Buckley Jr. have weighed in with op-ed pieces that express reservations about the death penalty over this matter of DNA and innocence.

Byron York, writing in The American Spectator, takes a different tack, arguing that innocence is a Trojan horse being used by liberals to advance a cause they have championed since the days of Darrow — abolition of capital punishment on the typical grounds: barbarism, racism, etc. The energetic Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., York points out, is virtually a wholly owned subsidiary of John R. “Rick” MacArthur, a rich left-winger whose taste in causes includes the Sandinistas and the Christic Institute.

York makes a valid point, and, as if to underscore it, all the usual suspects on the left have weighed in against capital punishment by simply topping their old arguments with a fresh concern about the risk of executing the innocent. In Hollywood, the writers of The Practice, a TV show concerning the law, turn one of their episodes into an anti-capital-punishment screed. From Chicago, Democratic representative Jesse Jackson Jr. authors a death-penalty-moratorium bill in the House. In Washington, Jackson’s father, wearing one of his many hats as a CNN newsman — he hosts a show called Both Sides, a title Fidel Castro must love — interviews defense lawyer Barry Scheck, and no one else, about his book on condemned men who have been proven innocent by DNA. At one point in the decidedly one-sided program, Jackson invokes the memory of Supreme Court justice Harry Blackmun, who famously wrote in a 1994 dissent, “From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty has failed.” Jackson and his lone guest keep using that word “moral” throughout the show, and the good reverend closes with the line “Let’s choose life over death, but through it all, at least let’s give life a chance.”

In sum, it’s enough to make any good conservative gag. Who wants to be on the same side as the Hollywood Left, or the two Jesse Jacksons, or Blackmun, the champion of life who wrote the Roe decision, or, for that matter, Barry Scheck, who attempted to convince the O.J. jury that DNA testing was a bunch of white man’s mumbo-jumbo? The answer is that conservatives need to ignore their impulse that anything the liberal establishment approves of, they must oppose. They should instead focus on this one issue: If a democratic society executes criminals with the foreknowledge that some percentage of them are innocent, are all members of that society implicitly guilty of murder themselves? And does it matter, from a moral and theological viewpoint, that we can’t know which convicts, specifically, will go to their deaths for crimes they did not commit, if we admit that some will? I submit that it does not.

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