Innocent people will be executed in the United States if the country’s capital punishment system is not reformed, warns a new report.

These reforms include improving the use of forensic science, taping confessions, and providing better trained counsel to defendants. These suggestions were among 39 recommendations released Wednesday in a report by the Constitution Project, a nonpartisan group working to improve the U.S. criminal justice system."If this [Constitution Project report] had been in place before I went to trial, I probably would not have gone to death row.” -- Anthony Graves

The report’s authors, collectively known as the Death Penalty Committee, include both supporters and opponents of the death penalty. The publication comes as the United States, one of just 43 countries that haven’t outlawed capital punishment, is in the midst of one of its largest national discussions on the issue in years.

More than 30 states in the United States continue to allow the death penalty, despite findings that the capital punishment system appears to be biased against minorities – and despite dozens of known cases of innocent people being sentenced to death. Since 1973, over 140 people have been exonerated from “death row”, but critics say it is impossible to tell how many of the 1400 who have been executed may have been innocent.

“Most disturbingly, there is evidence that defendants have been put to death despite significant questions regarding their innocence, undermining confidence in the entire criminal justice system,” the report states.

“There can no longer be any doubt that innocent people do get convicted of horrific crimes, spend years in prison and even face execution. Wrongful convictions undermine society’s confidence in the ability of the criminal justice system to perform its most basic function – to convict the guilty and acquit the innocent.”

The report comes just a week after a botched execution in the Midwestern state of Oklahoma. A prisoner named Clayton Lockett was scheduled to die by lethal injection, but the deadly chemicals were erroneously injected into his flesh.

The procedure reportedly drug out for almost half an hour, during which the conscious Lockett writhed in pain, according to his lawyer.

The Death Penalty Committee is recommending a single-dose injection, rather than the three drugs that Oklahoma and most other states currently use. The committee would also require that the federal government approve the drug or drugs used – a potentially important new issue given that states across the country are currently experimenting with new drugs, after pharmaceutical companies have started refusing to supply their products for lethal injections.

The horrific story has re-ignited a broad public conversation here. Yet advocates that work with the issue say that, while it is good to have the public’s attention on this issue, the more important concerns involve judicial mistakes.

“Despite the Oklahoma execution, I think the more important recommendations [in the new report] have to do with mistakes of innocence,” Richard Dieter, the executive director of Death Penalty Information Center, a clearinghouse, told IPS.

“Recommendations about improving the quality of counsel, the forensics, the DNA testing, the testing of evidence, the videotaping of suspects who are sometimes pressured into confessing something they did not want to do … these are the kinds of things that could help prevent wrongful convictions on death row and possibly wrongful executions.”

Fatal mistakes

Just this week, a federally funded study found that a minimum of four percent of prisoners on death row in the United States are innocent, according to research published Monday in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Although small, any number above zero represents an innocent person sentenced to death, like Anthony Graves. Graves was convicted in 1994 for murder and sentenced to death based on testimony supplied only by the other convicted murderer, Robert Carter.

Before his own execution, Carter repeatedly admitted that Graves was not involved, but the process of re-investigation took years. Finally, in 2010, Graves was exonerated and released.

“We’re never ever going to stop killing innocent people as long as we have the penalty,” Graves said Wednesday at a panel discussion here.

“But if this”, he continued, holding up a copy of the Constitution Project report, “had been in place before I went to trial, I probably would not have gone to death row.”

Potentially of help to Graves would have been a report recommendation on videotaping custodial interrogations. Following such a procedure, proponents say, would reduce the risk of false confessions – and provide juries with the context of confessions provided.

Another series of suggestions detail how to improve the use of forensic science in providing evidence.

Mark White, a former governor of Texas and co-chair of the Death Penalty Committee, described Wednesday the forensics police department in Houston, where “leaks in the ceiling contaminated samples and people were not qualified to do the sampling.”

According to a 2011 study, over 50 percent of the first 250 people exonerated by DNA testing were convicted based on forensic mistakes.

Another problem are inadequately trained attorneys.

Mark Earley, a former attorney general of Virginia, described how he was appointed fresh out of law school to represent a defendant on trial for his life. Earley said he also witnessed incompetent representation repeatedly during his time as attorney general, when he oversaw 36 executions in three and a half years.

“For someone who is a ‘small government’ conservative, why did I believe the government always gets it right?” he askedWednesday.

“It’s not about being for or against the death penalty. But it’s about saying that if there is a death penalty, the trial process should be fair.”

Slow reform

Some say the political climate in the U.S. is ripe for reform on the issue of capital punishment. Following the botched execution in Oklahoma, last week President Barack Obama requested that Attorney General Eric Holder review the application of the death penalty throughout the country.

“In the application of the death penalty in this country, we have seen significant problems – racial bias, uneven application of the death penalty … situations in which there were individuals on death row who later on were discovered to have been innocent because of exculpatory evidence,” Obama told reporters. “And all these, I think, do raise significant questions about how the death penalty is being applied.”

Experts in the field say that reform is likely, but only after a long and slow process.

“Unfortunately the death penalty is immersed in a political ballet,” the Death Penalty Information Center’s Dieter told IPS.

“I think the death penalty is actually declining by dramatic levels, and that will probably continue. It is not serving people well: it is expensive and it is picking out those who happen to be poor and minorities.”

Former U.S. Republican Congressman Asa Hutchinson hopes his country can redeem itself after torturing an unknown but certainly large number of detainees.

“There is no persuasive evidence in the public record that the widespread use of torture against suspected terrorists was necessary,” he said during a press briefing Tuesday in Washington.

“Torture often produces false information, and it is difficult and time-consuming for interrogators and analysts to distinguish what may be true and usable from that which is false and misleading,” Hutchinson continued.

“We see no evidence in the public record that the traditional means of interrogation would not have yielded the necessary intelligence following the attacks of 9/11,” he added.

Hutchinson is co-chair of the Constitution Project’s blue-ribbon Task Force on Detainee Treatment, a bipartisan group comprised of high-ranking U.S. officials from the judiciary, Congress, diplomatic service, military and intelligence agencies, as well as experts in law, medicine and ethics.

For over two years, the task force amassed public records and conducted over 100 interviews to shed light on the U.S.’s treatment of suspected terrorists since Sep. 11, 2001.

The task force concluded in a 560-page report that it is “indisputable that the U.S. engaged in the practice of torture” and that “the nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture”.

Hutchinson said that the task force’s definition of torture stems from historical and legal court cases. He explained that interrogation techniques the U.S. State Department identifies as torture when implemented by other nations are similar, if not identical, to some U.S. interrogation techniques.

Hutchinson said, “We as a nation have to get this right. I look back at history to the time during World War II when we interned some Japanese Americans. At the time, it seemed like a right and proper thing to do. But in the light of history, it was an error.”

He added, “This report will hopefully put into focus some of the actions taken in the post-9/11 environment.”

U.S. Ambassador James Jones, a democrat from Oklahoma and co-chair of the task force, noted the importance for his country to uphold and value the rule of law. “What we tried to do in this report is to point out where we separated ourselves and our official actions from those values, and how we must get back on track,” he said.

“We believe that this report is the most comprehensive record of detainee treatment across multiple administrations and multiple geographic theatres,” he added.

Laura Pitter, a counterterrorism adviser at Human Rights Watch’s U.S. Programme, told IPS, “It’s an incredibly important report.”

She added, “It’s not some kind of a political witch-hunt, it’s a bipartisan effort to look at things objectively.”

The report’s 11 chapters cover a span of topics, including detention at Guantanamo Bay, the role of psychologists in interrogation techniques, the U.S. rendition programme and the efficacy of torturing for information.

The report also includes character sketches of both victims and perpetrators of torture, such as Captain Albert Shimkus of the U.S. Naval Medical Corps, who was in charge of a medical facility in Guantánamo’s Camp Delta detention centre.

According to the report, Shimkus initially lauded Camp Delta’s treatment of detainees, comparing their medical treatment in Guantánamo to that received by U.S. troops.

But Shimkus now believes the commanders he reported to walled him off from the abuse U.S. detainees suffered. He told the task force that he had been used “as a tool” by those who wanted to draw a misleading picture of Guantánamo.

Asked why President Barack Obama’s administration has kept U.S. treatment of detainees in the shadows, Pitter told IPS, “There doesn’t appear to be the political will to unseal what the U.S. did in its name.”

She added, “It’s very unfortunate because it makes it very difficult for the U.S. to then argue that other countries should abide by these principles when (the U.S.) clearly did not… and then fails to account for it publically.”

Asked how U.S. torture of non-U.S. nationals affects diplomatic relations abroad, Pitter said, “When the U.S. engages in torture and abuse and fails to account for that abuse and hold those responsible for abuse, it undermines U.S. credibility to argue for the same type of adherence to those principles in other countries.”

She continued, “The impact is on U.S. foreign policy because (the U.S.) is working with these nations and these countries on a number of issues and (is undermining) their relationships.”

Pitter said that the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the U.S.’s own domestic laws obligate the U.S. to investigate torture and prosecute those who are responsible. But the report stated that “no CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) personnel have ever been convicted or even charged for numerous instances of torture in CIA custody.”

Pitter noted the existence of a 6,000-page classified report detailing the CIA’s detention and interrogation programme, and called for it to go public.

Pitter also noted that the U.S. is legally obligated to “provide redress to these victims… who were never charged for the crime and are released”.

She argued, “The wrongdoing that was done to them should be acknowledged, and there should be some ability to provide some kind of compensation to them for the years that they lost and the abuse that they suffered… So perhaps that’s the next step.”