The arbitrary nature of applying the death penalty and especially the issue of class status of the majority of the defendants eventually sentenced to death warns that caution definitely needs to be practiced.
Add to this the David Baldus' findings on the lop-sided application of the state-mandated execution of non-whites and especially blacks, which also warns that caution needs to be practiced.
Baldus (June 23, 1935 -- June 13, 2011) ushered in new ways to study social phenomena. His pioneering research on the death penalty nearly convinced the US Supreme Court in the 1987 Supreme Court decision McCleskey v. Kemp . The Supreme Court decided, though, that statistics did not matter!!
Regardless, the Baldus research uncovered a major finding that demonstrated that blacks were significantly and most importantly disproportionately more likely to be sentenced to death than whites. In addition, regardless of the race of the defendant, those who killed white victims were four times more likely to be sentenced to death than those accused of killing black victims. The gist of the Baldus research is this: a death sentence is more likely to be based on the race of the victim, not the offender.
Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens spoke to this issue in a New York Review of Books column. He put it thus:
That the murder of black victims is treated as less culpable than the murder of white victims provides a haunting reminder of once-prevalent Southern lynchings.
This becomes all the more important in that most capital-murder defendants are poor and unable to mount a legal defense. And, when court-appointed attorneys are appointed to represent them they are more likely than not to receive inferior counseling. Or least a defense that suffers from the ability to harness the resources--private investigators, scientific experts, independent DNA analysis--that are often critical to successfully establishing one's innocence.
The systemic nature of injustice is everywhere, leaving this writer to draw the hypothesis that YES, there must be innocent people who have been executed in the United States of America.
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