In the News
KUTV 2News reported Monday that a judge ordered Douglas Carter released on bail after more than 40 years on Utah’s death row. Utah County prosecutors dropped the death penalty last week after new DNA testing found Carter’s profile does not match blood from the crime scene.
Here’s My Take
Carter was sentenced to death twice, in 1985 and 1992. In 2025, the Utah Supreme Court upheld findings that police paid two witnesses about $4,000 and coached them to lie about it, and that the prosecutor withheld the payments and knowingly let false testimony stand. The court held those violations prejudiced his trial and resentencing. They came to light only after his lawyers located the witnesses in Mexico in 2011, 26 years after his original trial.
A living prisoner can benefit from that slow correction, and an executed one cannot. A 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that at least 1 in 25 people sentenced to death is innocent. Utah’s Legislative Fiscal Analyst estimated in 2012 that a death penalty case costs taxpayers about $1.66 million more than life without parole. Our policy brief, The High Price of Retribution, laid out both problems, and Libertas supported repeal bills in 2016, 2018, and 2022.
In Conclusion
Whatever a retrial decides, Carter’s case shows how long it can take for the truth about a conviction to come out. Libertas continues to support repealing the death penalty and relying on life without parole and other long sentences, which protect the public, cost less, and leave room to correct a mistake.
