The legacy of racism in the U.S. prison system and the persecution of innocent people show that the system has, in some cases, failed to correctly differentiate between innocent and guilty. This has lead to the unjust deaths of innocent people, which highlights ongoing flaws in the American Justice System. This death penalty is a tool of this unjust system, and must be abolished.

Texas has the most legal executions in the U.S., at 841, and has a long history of executing innocent people. This August, Larry Swearingen was executed for strangling Melissa Trotter, even though experts later found that much of the evidence used in the trial was falsified.

In 1995, 15-year-old Robert Pruett witnessed his father murder a man who Pruett had previously gotten into a verbal altercation with. Despite having a thin connection to the crime at best, Pruett was still sentenced to 99 years in prison due to the “Law of Parties,” which allows anyone involved in the crime to be prosecuted. Four years later, he was convicted of stabbing a prison guard to death and was promptly sent to death row. However, this secondary sentence was later found to be built on false evidence, and despite him seeking clemency, Pruett was still executed in 2017.

Pruett and Swearingen are just two examples of recent cases. Similar scenarios have happened to over half a dozen other people in the past four decades. Sentencing innocent people to death is morally abhorrent and unconscionable, and reform must happen.

The unfortunate thing is that these problems have been ongoing, and no real action has been taken by elected officials or private companies to rectify them. In 2016, a United Nations report conducted by the Sentencing Project found that African Americans are 5.9 times more likely to be imprisoned than their white counterparts, and Hispanic Americans are 3.1 times more likely. There is a distinct racial bias in the criminal justice system that results in more people of one race going to prison than another. This bias is deadly when execution is considered.

A disproportionate number of African-Americans have been executed when compared to white Americans. According to the Death Penalty Info Center, 34.1% of executed prisoners since 1976 have been African-American, despite composing only 13.4% of the American population. In comparison, 55.7% of the executed population has been white. While the percentage is larger for white Americans, it is lower proportionally than that of African American prisoners to their population as a whole. The percentage of executed African-Americans is almost three times larger than the percent of that population. African-Americans are being killed at an unequal rate when compared to white Americans, again highlighting a clear bias.

Aside from the intrinsic bias present in the justice system, the forensic science that convicts people is sometimes unreliable. The “smoking gun” in the Larry Swearingen case was a match between pantyhose found in Swearingen’s apartment and the pantyhose used to strangle Trotter. Later, experts found that the two pantyhose did not match each other. Furthermore, the medical examiner testified at trial that Trotter’s body was 25 days old when found, but later that same medical examiner, along with four other forensic pathologists, went back and said that the body was two weeks old. Swearingen was in prison for 22 days when the body was found. If Trotter’s body was two weeks old when it was found, it was impossible that Swearingen could have murdered her. Swearingen was convicted on faulty evidence that was later recounted, even though many witnesses testified to Swearingen and Trotter having a friendly relationship. Additionally, although Trotter repeatedly received calls from a mystery man who was not Swearingen that threatened to strangle her, Swearingen was still killed for his “crime”.

The criminal justice system is built off of occasionally faulty science and racial bias, and the death penalty has wrongfully taken the lives of likely hundreds of innocent people. Larry Swearingen’s last words emphasize a desperate need for change: “Lord forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”