If unable to afford good legal help, families of defendants must depend on inexperienced, underpaid, and often incompetent court appointed attorneys, or settle, in desperation, for any lawyer who will take the case, regardless of reputation. A Chicago Tribune study of death penalty cases found that thirty-three defendants sentenced to die were represented by a lawyer who had been disbarred or suspended. Even when the lawyers are competent they often do not have the money to conduct their own thorough investigations. But many defendants are represented by lawyers who are paid a few thousand dollars or less and spend as little as two days on the case. It is striking that in three cases in Illinois, college students working on class projects at Northwestern University were able to find evidence that had escaped the attention of defense lawyers.
Capital punishment is a method open to irremediable mistakes.
The 1965 statement reported that it was estimated that the wrong person was executed as high as 5 percent of the time. There are too many variables, such as the vagaries of memory, erroneous recognition, fallibility of experts, faulty summing up, shortcomings of legal aid, jurors, rough police methods of obtaining evidence, sensational newspaper coverage and biased public opinion. The current emphasis on faster executions, fewer resources for the defense, and an expansion in the number of death cases mean that the execution of innocent people is even more likely. The deadliest year on the United States' death row in almost half a century was 1999. Today more than 3,600 people are on death row in the United States, and in 1999 alone there were ninety-eight executions.