This increase opens the door for mistakes to be made. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported a total of 3,219 prisoners awaiting execution as of December 1996, a 5 percent increase over the previous year (Rein et al. 67). The number of prisoners on death row has been increasing for more than fifteen years. Thirty-six of the thirty-eight states with capital punishment statutes provide automatic review of all capital sentences. While most of those states automatically review both the conviction and the sentence, Indiana, Idaho, Tennessee, Montana, and Oklahoma require only a review of the sentence. If an inmate in one of those states wanted a conviction reviewed, he or she would have to file an appeal or lose his or her right to do so. Catching error during review is an extensive process. The national average is 10.6 years from the time the sentenc!.
e is imposed to the last inspection and execution (Liebman et al., par. 13). Many innocent death row prisoners have waited for years for the lengthy review procedures to uncover errors.
Law enforcement and prosecutors also add to the error rate in capital convictions. Eager to solve and close homicide cases, police and prosecution have demonstrated unethical actions by suppressing evidence or wrongly influencing witnesses. For eighteen years, Dennis Williams, along with three other .
black men, lived on death row. The four men were convicted in 1978 of the kidnapping and murder of a white couple in a suburb of Chicago, Illinois. After receiving an anonymous tip, police arrested them even though they had no physical evidence linking the men to the crime. Mr. Williams maintained his innocence but was convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury. In 1987, he was granted a retrial but was again sentenced to death. He had lost all faith in the legal system at that point. However, after eighteen years on death row in a cell just twenty-five feet away from the electric chair, Williams was found innocent and released.
