Admitting a mistake can be very hard. But how would it feel if the mistake helped put a man on death row?
That’s the burden the Rev. Brian Wharton has been carrying for more than two decades. He played a crucial role in the prosecution of Robert Roberson, who was found guilty in 2003 of killing his 2-year-old daughter and sentenced to death.
But as the Opinion video above explores, Wharton came to regret his involvement and the outcome of the case. He recently visited Texas death row, along with a crew from Opinion Video, and met with Roberson. It was the first time the men had spoken with each other since before Roberson’s conviction.
The film is the first in a three-part series that we’re publishing over the next few weeks, each taking a critical view of the death penalty by exposing flaws in cases and questioning whether retributive justice can truly provide closure. The videos are in keeping with The Times’s longstanding position that the punishment is full of bias and error, morally abhorrent and futile in deterring crime and should be abolished.
The series lands at a hopeful but still-challenging time in the movement to get rid of capital punishment in the United States.
The death penalty has been falling out of favor with officials and the broader public alike over the past three decades, in part owing to what the Death Penalty Information Center called “society’s greater understanding about the fallibility of our legal system and its inability to protect innocent people from execution.” Twenty-nine states have now either abolished the death penalty or have paused executions by executive action, up from 12 in 1999.
Last year, for the first time, a Gallup poll found that more Americans said the death penalty is administered unfairly (50 percent) than fairly (47 percent). And the percentage of people who support the death penalty has fallen steadily since the mid-1990s, according to Gallup, dropping to 53 percent this year, the lowest since 1972.
But other recent data urgently underscores how much hard work remains for abolitionists. The downward trend in the number of executions that prevailed for two decades — there were 11 in 2021, way down from the peak of 98 in 1999 — has recently reversed. There were 18 executions in 2022 and 24 last year, a worrisome uptick driven in part by governors and prosecutors seeking to burnish their crime-fighting bona fides.
And there are still about 2,400 prisoners sitting on death row around the United States, awaiting their execution. One of them is Robert Roberson. But in the video above, Wharton argues that the deeply flawed case against Roberson is a clear example of why the death penalty should be eliminated.
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