Thank you all for inviting me to take part in this distinguished lecture series.

And if anyone needs to leave early to make sure they do their duty at the polls, it won’t hurt my feelings at all.

I want to focus my remarks today on the death penalty debate in the United States, and particularly in the Congress. For the first time in generations, we seem to be on the verge of the first relatively mature debate about the flaws in the way the death penalty is applied, and I want to describe what we have done to lay the groundwork for some solutions. But first I want to touch on the broader picture, which is the state of the death penalty outside the United States.

Most Americans know that the death penalty has been practiced virtually everywhere in the world for centuries. What most of us as Americans may not realize, however, is how much things have changed in other parts of the world. There now is a clear trend around the world toward abolishing the death penalty. The number of countries that have stopped using the death penalty has grown to an all-time high of 108. That is more than half the countries in the world, including almost every Western democracy.

Just in the last decade, more than 30 countries abolished the death penalty. Other countries imposed a moratorium on executions. Russia suspended executions and went a step farther toward abolition last year by commuting all existing death sentences to life.

With all the movement toward abolition, there has been a remarkable shift in how the world views the death penalty. It used to be that the death penalty was strictly a criminal justice issue. Now, the death penalty tends to be viewed as a human rights issue.

Our recent experience with the death penalty has been far different, as we have expanded its use.

Last year, 98 people were executed in this country. That is the most executions in one year since 1951. The Federal Government and 38 of the 50 states have the death penalty, and there are more than 3,600 people on death row.

Vermont -- in my view, to our credit -- is one of the 12 states that abolished the death penalty.

The last execution in Vermont was in 1954, and the penalty was abolished nine years later, in 1965.

Although most states still have the death penalty, public opinion this year appears to be shifting somewhat. This has been a particularly interesting year for talking about capital punishment.

The death penalty used to be one of the "third rails" of American politics, with anyone expressing concern about it being branded a "liberal" and targeted for defeat. A few years ago, all we heard about was "the need for speed" – the drive to shorten the appeals process in death penalty cases. Little if any attention was given to ensuring that the system was not only speedy, but also fair, just and accurate.

This year, for the first time, the debate has matured into a constructive dialogue about the problems plaguing our death penalty system, and what should be done about them. Death penalty reform is in the political mainstream and within our reach. It has the attention of the American people, the Congress, and both presidential candidates.

Why the change? I think the answer is clear. The American people are disturbed by the mounting evidence that our criminal justice system has serious flaws: Innocent people can and do get sentenced to death, and with alarming frequency.

In the last quarter of a century, about 670 people have been executed in the United States.

During the same time, 89 people have been found innocent and were released from death row – five this year alone.

These are not reversals based on technical legal grounds. These are people whose convictions were overturned after years on death row because it was discovered that they were not guilty. Even though in some instances they came within hours of being executed, the authorities had to admit that -- oops, we made a mistake – we have the wrong person. Oops is not a word that anyone wants to hear in connection with the death penalty.

DNA testing has been a big part of the story. When modern science proves that innocent people have been sentenced to death – not just once or twice, and not just in one or two states, but over and over again, and across the country – it is hard for even the most stubborn death penalty supporters to keep pretending that everything is fine and that the system is working.

Earlier this year, Republican Governor George Ryan of Illinois declared a moratorium on executions because, he said, he had grave concerns about Illinois’ shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row. Since 1977, Illinois has exonerated 13 of its death row inmates; it has executed 12.

Some who want to gloss over these problems try to argue that this is just, quote, "an Illinois problem." But the situation in Illinois is not unique. The 89 exonerations I mentioned span more than 20 different states.

People of good conscience can and will disagree on the morality of the death penalty. I have always opposed it. I did when I was a prosecutor, and I do today. But no matter what you believe about the death penalty, no one wants to see innocent people sentenced to death. That is why, today, there is a growing national consensus on the need for major death penalty reforms.

I come from a background as a prosecutor, as State’s Attorney in Chittenden County for eight years. I worked with and on behalf of the victims of crime. But I wanted those I prosecuted to have competent counsel and access to the evidence that I had. Any prosecutor worth his or her salt will tell you that the last thing you want is to have to retry the same case years later, when the evidence has grown cold and the witnesses or their memories have begun to fade away.

After spending most of a year studying the problems in the death penalty machinery, I spent several more months consulting with the experts on the front lines to put together the best solutions. This past February I introduced a bill called the Innocence Protection Act. Its primary goal is to reduce the risk that innocent people will be put to death. The Innocence Protection Act calls for two principal reforms, which relate to DNA testing and the appointment of counsel.

The need to make DNA testing more available is obvious. We all know that DNA testing is an extraordinary tool for uncovering the truth, whatever the truth may be. It is the fingerprint of the 21^st Century. Prosecutors across the country rightly use it to prove guilt. By the same token, it should also be used to prove innocence.

There are many people in prison today who were convicted before DNA testing was available. Some of these people are innocent and might be able to prove their innocence if they could only get DNA tests on the evidence in their cases. Most Americans think inmates should have access to DNA testing as a matter of basic fairness. But many states resist requests for post-conviction testing. The Innocence Protection Act would ensure that post-conviction DNA testing is available.

On the counsel issue, the basic concept of the bill is that if a state is going to have the death penalty, it should shoulder its most basic responsibility of ensuring a fair trial. That means taking the basic step of making sure that every defendant has adequate legal representation.

As you know, the Constitution requires the government to provide an attorney for any defendant who cannot afford one. The unfortunate fact is that if you are wealthy, you almost certainly will not get the death penalty. In parts of the country, it is often better to be rich and guilty than poor and innocent. Far too often, defendants find their lives placed in the hands of underpaid court-appointed lawyers who are inexperienced, inept, or uninterested. In Texas, there have been several notorious cases in which defense lawyers slept through large portions of capital murder trials.

The Senate Judiciary Committee heard this year from a man named Dennis Fritz, a science teacher and football coach, a father with a young daughter. Dennis Fritz spent 12 years in prison for a crime he did not commit. He was represented at his capital murder trial by a civil liabilities lawyer, not a criminal lawyer. Maybe he was a very good civil liabilities lawyer, but he had never handled any type of criminal case, much less a capital murder case, and he had no real incentive to defend Mr. Fritz because he was paid only $500. When DNA tests were finally performed on the crime scene evidence, years later, the results cleared Mr. Fritz, they cleared his co-defendant, who had come within five days of being executed, and they established the identity of the real killer.

I met a young woman this year named Shawn Armbrust. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, Shawn took a journalism class with a professor named David Protess. The class project was to investigate the case of Anthony Porter, who was about to be executed in Illinois.

Shawn told me that she signed up for that class because she thought it sounded "cool." She said that when she started reading about the Porter case, she had "zero experience with the criminal justice system." Four months later, thanks largely to Shawn and her classmates, Porter was out of prison, and the real killer had confessed.

Shawn said the experience left her feeling uncomfortable, because as she put it, "People shouldn’t be relying on kids like me to get them off of death row."

She is right, of course, but the point is broader. If a state wants to put people on trial for their lives, it should at least do it properly. That means qualified defense lawyers who know what they are doing, and who have the resources to do it well. Not underpaid civil liabilities lawyers, and not college undergraduates.

Those are the key principles of the Innocence Protection Act: providing DNA testing where it is relevant, and ensuring that court-appointed lawyers are competent and adequately funded.

The bill does not go as far as I would like. It does not abolish the death penalty. It does not place a moratorium on executions. It does not tackle all the injustices inflicted upon racial minorities by the present capital punishment system. And it leaves the United States in a tiny minority of nations that continue to execute the mentally retarded and juvenile offenders – those who were convicted of crimes they committed before they were 18 years old.

But after 25 years in the Senate, I know that bipartisanship and compromise is the only way to make any progress at all on Capitol Hill.

I learned from my work to abolish anti-personnel landmines that slow and steady often does it when you are out to turn around a policy that is deeply imbedded in the status quo. With the landmines initiative, and now with death penalty reform, the first step was to build a bipartisan coalition, and then to grow the coalition until we reach critical mass for reform. The Innocence Protection Act embodies a consensus approach, and because of that, it has been gaining ground. We have 14 cosponsors in the Senate and about 80 in the House. We have Democratic and Republican cosponsors, death penalty opponents and death penalty supporters. President Clinton, Vice President Gore, Attorney General Reno and Joe Lieberman – all Democrats who support the death penalty -- have all expressed support for the bill. So have conservative Republican death penalty proponents like columnist George Will.

It has not been easy, and we still face several more obstacles.

Despite all this support for the bill, the Republican leadership in Congress would not let the bill come to a vote this year. Like so many important issues, reform of the capital punishment system fell victim to election-year politics. The 106^th Congress will end later this month without having passed the Innocence Protection Act or any other legislation on post-conviction DNA testing or competent counsel.

But in just under a year we have made more progress than just about anyone thought possible when I introduced the Innocence Protection Act in February. We have turned the corner in demonstrating that the death penalty machinery is broken, and the public is ahead of the politicians in understanding that. Now the battle lines are being drawn over how much or how little reform we need. Just two weeks ago the Senate passed a resolution I wrote calling on the states to offer broader access to post-conviction DNA testing, and to improve the quality of legal representation in capital cases. That statement of findings would not have passed even six months ago. This resolution now can serve as a blueprint for effective reform in the new 107th Congress.

You may want to know what you can do to help shape the outcome of this debate, and I have several suggestions.

When a death penalty story shows up in a newspaper or magazine you are reading or on a TV newscast, watch to see if any of these flaws are part of the picture. Then talk with your friends and family about what it means.

And I invite you to take a look at the information I have about the Innocence Protection Act on my home page.

If you either agree, or disagree, or have suggestions of your own, tell your elected representatives in Congress, and tell the next president. One letter or phone call may not seem like much, but that one message prompts your representatives -- at minimum -- to tune in to the issue and to learn about the Innocence Protection Act.

Finally, find out about your state’s system for providing counsel to indigent defendants and for granting post-conviction access to DNA evidence. Vermont ranks high on the scale, but many states have dismal rules and dismal records. Let your state representatives know if reforms are needed.

The struggle on Capitol Hill for these reforms is tough going. I cannot give you any guarantees about how far we will get. A lot rides on today’s elections. But the tide is changing on Capitol Hill as it is across the nation and throughout the world, and I believe that the decency and common sense of the American people will prevail.

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