Letter: Death penalty numbers hold up

Thursday, March 7, 2002 | 8:51 a.m.

In criticizing Columbia University Law School's death penalty study, Deputy District Attorney Chris Owens asks where our numbers are from. We report the results of final state and federal court decisions reviewing Nevada death verdicts for flaws between 1973 and 1995.

Serious flaws were found 68 percent of the time. Mr. Owens says how often Clark County sought the death penalty, but does not compare the county to others in the U.S. We did.

Clark County used the death penalty more often than almost all comparable counties and had higher error rates (64 percent) and higher rates of imposing death sentences on people later found not guilty (it did so twice) than most counties using the death penalty less often.

Mr. Owens says he prefers Justice Department statistics to ours. The Justice Department doesn't report statistics about county error rates in capital cases. Mr. Owens says the system works because errors eventually are fixed by court appeals. We document cases where a full set of court appeals approved innocent people for execution.

In any event, if your car breaks down seven out of every 10 times you drive it, do the thousands of dollars you pay to fix it prove the car works fine?

JAMES LIEBMAN

Editor's note: The writer is a law professor at Columbia University.