Those who hold others accountable must be held accountable. Too often there is a culture within law enforcement that diminishes transparency and accountability, while demanding accountability from those law enforcement is charged with protecting and serving.

Elected city, county and state leaders must restore this balance by abolishing the death penalty, reforming sentencing practices, establishing police civilian review boards to hold rogue officers responsible, revising the training that police currently receive and bringing a new level of responsibility and transparency to policing in communities across the Commonwealth.

While these efforts reach beyond death penalty abolition, they nonetheless play a role in the criminal justice system that too often ends in government-sanctioned executions. In the early years of our existence, KCADP grappled with requests to support issues other than abolition. The Board decided that our narrow focus – to abolish the death penalty – allowed us to endorse only those policy issues that directly impact citizens being sentenced to death.

For example, KCADP joined other Louisville organizations that were calling for a Police Citizen Review Board to hold police accountable for their behavior, especially in the Black community. That effort, led by the Kentucky Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression, failed.

Recent events cause us to consider again the people’s demands for racial justice and accountability for police when they engage in racist behavior. This behavior can be the beginning of the process in which innocent people are convicted, imprisoned, and sometimes sentenced to death.

As of July 31, 2020 the National Registry of Exonerations reports that there have been 2,653 exonerations since 1989. On March 7, 2017, the Registry reported: “Most innocent defendants who have been exonerated in the United States in the past 28 years are African Americans—almost half of the nearly 2,000 individual exonerations that we know about.”

The Registry further reported that in the years 2017 – 2019 “Official Misconduct” contributed to the conviction of 284 defendants, 65% of those exonerated in those three years.

This can have grave consequences beyond depriving someone of freedom by unjustly locking them up for years. In a society that executes its citizens, official misconduct committed by police or prosecutors can also result in the taking of innocent human life.

The Death Penalty Information Center maintains a database of the 170 people who have been exonerated after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death. Official misconduct is cited in 43 of the 170 cases as a cause for the conviction and death sentences these defendants received. Of these 43 cases, 56% (24) are identified as Black; if those identified as Latino are included, then the percentage of exonerated persons of color condemned to death due to official misconduct rises to 65% (28).

In Kentucky, the Department of Public Advocacy’s Kentucky Innocence Project has worked hard to establish the innocence of several Kentucky prisoners. This webpage –https://dpa.ky.gov/who_we_are/KIP/Pages/Exonerations.aspx – lists twenty “success” stories.

Official misconduct was cited as cause for the conviction in six of these 20 cases. Nearly one-third of those exonerated were victims of police and other official misconduct.

Of these six persons, two are Black, one-third of the total of wrongfully convicted persons in a state whose Black population is seven percent. We cannot estimate how many Black people and other people of color are currently incarcerated, or have been executed, for crimes they did not commit.

KCADP concludes that race is often a deciding factor in the conviction, incarceration and sentencing to long prison terms, and even death, of defendants facing trial. Long before trial, misconduct by police and prosecutors has an impact on trial outcomes.

Thus, KCADP must add its voice to the current protests by Black Lives Matter and others who are demanding new ways of policing, new instruments by which the police will be held accountable in Kentucky, and transparency throughout the criminal justice system.

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