The dirty truth about the death penalty.

 Time Magazine gave long-time death penalty attorney David Dow a platform to air his views on the capital punishment system this week.

“I tell people that if you’re going to commit murder, you want to be white and you want to be wealthy – so that you can hire a first class lawyer – and you want to kill a black person.”

This is Dow’s opinion on the US capital punishment system. It is a system in which he has been embroiled for the past twenty years.

His is an assessment hard to refute, then. Dow’s statement highlights the dirty truth of the death penalty: by exploiting all existing social injustices it preys on the weak, exploits the poor and picks out the marginalised. When faced with capital punishment, those let down by society in their past are let down once again. And this time they pay with their life. “[T]here were any number of points in the lives of my clients where I truly believe that if society had intervened more aggressively, it could have done something” says Dow.

And as he argues, surely the $1.2bn spent on capital punishment since its reinstatement, could have been better spent? Perhaps on preventing the development of a marginalised underclass in the first place?