Introduction to the Brief of the American Society for Adolescent Psychiatry and the American Orthopsychiatric Association as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner in Thompson v. Oklahoma

At long last, there appears to be growing opposition to the death penalty in the United States. In this bustling and self-absorbed society, issues, regardless of how important, increasingly need a “hook” in order to make it into the newspapers and thrust themselves into public consciousness. In the case of the death penalty, the hook is the new science of DNA identification and its ability, already demonstrated, to absolve innocent persons who have nonetheless ended up on the death rows of scores of states. So fallible has the system by which individuals are sentenced to death been shown to be that in 2000 Governor George Ryan of Illinois imposed a moratorium on all executions in his state until the issues are further studied.