RAY KRONE IS lucky to be alive. He spent 10 years in an Arizona prison, two of them on death row, for a murder he did not commit.
"It's difficult to describe what it is like to serve time on death row knowing you are innocent," says Krone, who, in 2002, became the 100th prisoner on death row to be released since the death penalty was reintroduced in the United States in 1973. "All you know is that what seems like an awful nightmare is now reality, a reality beyond comprehension."
Now the director of communications for an organisation called Witness to Innocence, Krone spends his days challenging the criminal justice system that failed him, as well as counselling and supporting a frighteningly long list of other innocent "exonerees".
In 1992, Krone was convicted of the murder of a woman in a bar in Phoenix, Arizona, largely on the basis of circumstantial evidence, and sentenced to death. After years of appeals, with the assistance of attorney Alan Simpson, in 2002 he was finally able to convince a court that DNA found at the murder scene cleared him and implicated a different assailant. Despite the ill luck which landed him in jail in the first place, in many ways Krone considers himself fortunate. Unlike the vast majority of prisoners on death row, he had substantial financial support - from his cousin, Jim Rix, who spent almost $100,000 (€63,000) on Krone's legal fees - and the benefit of DNA evidence, which is available in only 15 per cent of cases. Once convicted, a death-row prisoner in the US faces huge obstacles in fighting back: according to Witness to Innocence, which is calling for a moratorium on the death penalty, poor legal representation, racial prejudice and prosecutorial misconduct all contribute to injustice.
The morality of Krone's case is clear-cut: he was an innocent man wrongly sentenced to death. But Krone himself is opposed to the use of the death penalty in all circumstances, even when the crimes are heinous and the prisoner's guilt apparently established. "I don't believe in any punishment that is not reversible," he says.
While supporters of state- sanctioned killing consider it the best defence against recidivism - after all, executed murderers cannot kill again - Krone is adamant that the possibility of error in all judicial systems means that innocent people will inevitably be executed. The irrevocability of capital punishment is also a reason for Amnesty International's global campaign against it.
The human rights organisation, which launches its 2007 annual report on the death penalty today, considers such killing to be "the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment". Amnesty insists not only that the practice is discriminatory - disproportionately used against the poor and marginalised - but also that it simply doesn't work. Research shows that the death penalty does not deter crime more than other punishments.
The report itself makes stark reading. Despite a decline in the number of states that continue to use the death penalty, at least 1,252 people are known to have been executed worldwide last year. According to Amnesty, China is the world's biggest user of the death penalty, with at least 470 executions last year (although, as the organisation acknowledges, the true figure is likely to be far higher). The US-based Dui Hua Foundation estimates that 6,000 people were executed in China last year, based on figures obtained from local officials. China is followed by Iran (at least 317 executions) and Saudi Arabia (at least 143). The US executed precisely 42 people in 2007.
Amnesty does not draw a moral distinction between the methods of execution used, from the wild brutality of stoning in Tehran to coldly clinical lethal injections in Texas. As Karol Balfe, campaigns manager at Amnesty's Irish section remarks, "there is no humanistic form of the death penalty - it brutalises everyone involved, no matter how it's carried out".
Balfe is especially concerned about the growing use of the death penalty for non-violent crimes in Iran, where in 2007 a father of two was stoned to death for adultery. Eleven more people - nine of whom are women - are currently awaiting a similar fate. Even children are not exempt: five teenage offenders, one aged only 13, were executed in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Yemen last year.
"Whoever has committed murder, must die" wrote Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant, who believed that no other penalty was capable of satisfying justice. It's an unequivocal view often invoked by supporters of state-sanctioned execution. But the 10-year-old daughter of a man recently executed in the US came up with her own, equally powerful form of logic. She asked: "They're going to kill him because he killed somebody, so when they kill him who do we get to kill?"
As far as Ray Krone is concerned, it's the possibility that the wrong person is being put to death that makes abolition of the death penalty the only answer.
"I would not trust the state to execute a person for committing a crime against another person," he says. "I know how the system works. I know what prison is like, I know what the judges are like, I know what the prosecutors are like. It's not about justice or fairness or equality. Any chance I can, I tell [ people] what happened to me. Because if it happened to me, it can happen to anyone."
