Will so many 'mistakes' make U.S. reconsider the death penalty?

By Debra Adams Simmons, HISTORY Executive Editor

Imagine spending decades on death row, missing your parents’ funerals, being unable to watch your children grow up or living with the fear of being executed, for a crime you didn’t commit.

The day Kwame Ajamu arrived at the maximum-security Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, he was escorted to a cellblock filled with condemned men. At the end of death row was a room that held Ohio’s electric chair. Before the guards put him in his cell, they made a point of walking him past that room. “One of the guards really wanted me to see that chair,” Ajamu recalled. “I’ll never forget his words: ‘That’s gonna be your hot date.’ ”

Condemned to die as a 17-year-old after he was wrongly convicted of murdering a Cleveland salesman based on the false testimony of a 13-year-old boy, Ajamu wasn't exonerated for 39 years. National Geographic recently chronicled the experiences of 16 people sentenced to death who later were exonerated, including Shujaa Graham, pictured above, at right, with his son.

“The daily paths they travel as former death-row inmates are every bit as daunting, terrifying, and confusing as the burden of innocence that once taunted them,” Phillip Morris writes for Nat Geo. “The post-traumatic stress faced by a wrongly convicted person who has awaited execution by the government doesn’t dissipate simply because the state frees the inmate, apologizes, or even provides financial compensation—which often is not the case.”

Public support for the sentencing people to death is waning. More than 70 percent of the world’s nations have rejected the death penalty in either law or practice, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Americans’ support for capital punishment has dropped significantly since 1996, when 78 percent supported the death penalty for people convicted of murder. By 2018, support had fallen to 54 percent, according to the Pew Research Center.

Last week, Virginia, a state that has sentenced people to die for more than 400 years, abolished the death penalty, becoming the first southern state to ban capital punishment and joining 22 other states.

During the past five decades, 185 former death-row prisoners have been exonerated of all charges related to their death sentences, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Advances such as the use of DNA testing have led to a small decrease in wrongful convictions but have not been sufficient to overcome official misconduct and human error. DNA testing and scrutiny of actions by police, prosecutors, and public defenders as of December 2020 had led to more than 2,700 exonerations overall since 1989. Groups such as the Innocence Project have shed light on how dangerously fallible the U.S. justice system can be, particularly in capital cases.

“These people were caught up in a Kafkaesque nightmare, often caused by police or prosecutorial misconduct, or witnesses who lied or were mistaken,” National Geographic Editor in Chief Susan Goldberg writes. “Most of the wrongly convicted had poor legal representation; disproportionate numbers of them were people of color…They sat on death row, typically in solitary confinement, sometimes for decades.”

Each of the former death-row prisoners National Geographic photographed by Martin Schoeller belongs to an organization called Witness to Innocence. Based in Philadelphia since 2005, WTI is a nonprofit, led by death row exonerees, working to see the death penalty abolished in the United States, by shifting public opinion on capital punishment. The group is hosting a discussion Wednesday about the impact of justice gone wrong.

“I was a child when I was sent to prison to be killed,” Ajamu, now chair of the Witness to Innocence’s board, told National Geographic. “I did not understand what was happening to me or how it could happen. At first, I begged God for mercy, but soon it dawned on me that there would be no mercy coming.”

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

Before March Madness, two peach crates: 130 years ago, those crates and a ball were what James Naismith used to keep students amused in an indoor gym during a New England storm. “Naismith wanted to create a game that would be simple to understand but complex enough to be interesting,” Nat Geo’s Tucker C. Toole writes. The kids loved it. And so, basketball was born. Here’s how the NCAA’s climactic tournament is going.

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The trade in ‘holy relics’: Were they even real? In the Middle Ages, a brisk business in relics claimed to have been associated with Jesus or Mary sparked con artists to take advantage of the faithful, selling outright fakes. “These objects would feature in the disputes that led to Europe’s violent split between Catholicism and Protestantism,” Nat Geo’s History magazine reports. Subscribers can read more here.

R.I.P. Beverly Cleary: She had a simple idea. No pioneer characters. No English children. "I think children want to read about normal, everyday kids. That's what I wanted to read about when I was growing up," Beverly Cleary once said. And that's why her beloved children's books, such as those with Ramona Quimby, never went out of print. Cleary died in Carmel, California, NPR reported. She was 104.

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Sunday swim: Sisters play in a river after church in Grantsville, Maryland. The image was part of a March 1998 story that retraced the path of the United States' first highway. Federal funding began in 1811 for the National Road, which connected the Potomac and the Ohio rivers and carried thousands of settlers West. Much of the road today is part of U.S. Route 40.

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Water scarcity: You need water to wash your hands to try to stop the spread of COVID-19. In parts of El Salvador, that’s a problem. The scarcity—or general inaccessibility— prompted an unlikely coalition of women to fight bureaucracy and sexism to get water to the people who need it to prepare food, to drink, to wash, and try to ward off disease. The CDC says access to water and proper hygiene could reduce COVID-19 deaths worldwide by 6 percent, Anna-Catherine Brigida reports for Nat Geo. (Above, four-year-old Steven Portillo receives an outdoor bath at his home in Caña Brava, a rural section of the Santo Tomás municipality in El Salvador where there isn't any indoor plumbing. Below, a protester carried a sign reading "We demand quality water" at an International Women's Day march in San Salvador.)

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Erupting Iceland: What’s it like watching lava flow as a volcano erupts? Photographer Chris Burkard shows you in this new Nat Geo TikTok video from smoldering southwestern Iceland. The slow-mo eruption has attracted thousands of curiosity seekers, but Chris explains the danger of poisonous gas or bigger eruptions on the landscape. “Those things could be destroyed at the moment’s notice,” he tells Whitney Johnson, our director of visual and immersive experiences.

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IN A FEW WORDS

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LAST GLIMPSE

The massive Buddhas: Photographer Pascal Maitre got to document the towering statues of Bamiyan in 1996 amid the instability in Afghanistan that left the 1,500-year-old treasures pockmarked and fragmented (above left). The UNESCO World Heritage Site had drawn tourists and archaeologists until the country became too unstable to host them. Five years later, the Taliban, on the verge of taking power again in the nation, used explosives to obliterate the statues. Maitre later captured the now-empty niches in the hillside. “I could not understand,” he told Nat Geo. “I had seen it—and then it disappeared.”

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