And I think that question dictates that we end the death penalty. This is a basic question of fairness and credibility.

That would be the first thing I would say even before we get to questions of morality and philosophy and theology. We would recognize that kind of error, that kind of risk, as just unacceptable. We may all like apples, but if the word comes out that one out of nine apples in the store will kill you if you touch it, no one would buy apples. The threshold question is: Do we deserve to kill? And if you have a system of justice that treats you better if you’re rich and guilty than if you’re poor and innocent if you have a system that has been compromised by politics and arbitrariness and racial bias if you have a system that’s so unreliable that for every nine people we’ve executed in this country, we’ve now identified one innocent person on death row who has been exonerated, that’s a shocking rate of error. The first thing I would say is that we can’t make a decision about the death penalty by asking whether people deserve to die for the crimes they’ve committed. That’s when we will really be able to claim significant progress. We need to stop this punishment approach to people who are vulnerable, like children and the mentally ill.

We need to see hundreds of thousands of fewer people in our jails and prisons. There’s certainly more interest now than ever before, and I think that’s encouraging I just think we cannot settle for, you know, awareness and consciousness-raising and attention. And I think there is a growing awareness that we made a lot of mistakes, that our system is not sufficiently reliable to impose some of the harsh punishments that we imposed, including things like the death penalty. There’s a growing consensus that treating people who are dealing with drug addiction and drug dependency as criminals, rather than seeing that as a health-care problem, is a serious problem and a mistake. There’s bipartisan recognition that we have way too many people in our jails and prisons. So I think in that respect, we have turned a corner. It was an environment where everyone was competing with each other over who could be the toughest, who could articulate the most extreme punishment. No one paid any attention to the wrongful convictions, the racial disparities, the botched executions, the excessive punishment of children. But, you know, for the first 15, 20 years of my work, no one seemed to care.

I don’t know that I would say “significantly closer,” because we still have this obscenely high rate of incarceration in America, and that’s going to have to change dramatically before we can claim significant progress.

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