Haha Invictus... sorry but it happens frequently, accepting the risk is one thing, denying it occurs is ludicrous.
Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, who originally ruled in favor of the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia (1972), said this in 1994:
“From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored -- indeed, I have struggled--along with a majority of this Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.”
He was referring to glaring inequalities in the application of the death penalty to males, minorities, and the economically disadvantaged. The proportion of murder cases wherein these groups received a death penalty sentence was above the ratio of murders committed by these groups compared to murders on the whole. In 1972, this was brought to the Court's attention, and the judges ruled that it should be reformed or abolished. The nation took the course of reform. However, nothing changed. Minorities, males, and low income groups are still executed more than their fair share dictates, revealing a gross, if subconscious bias on the part of sentencing courts against these groups.
Regarding wrongful sentences: In 1987 the Stanford Law Review published a detailed examination of about 350 cases involving convictions of individuals, later found to be innocent. The conclusions were again unequivocal. If the evidence failed “to convince the reader of the fallibility of human judgment,” the authors wrote, “then nothing will.” Five years later, in 1992, the study was updated. The conclusions remained the same.
In 1992 the Innocence project was founded and began exonerating, or attempting to exonerate, prisoners based on new evidence. Dozens of cases cropped up, and continue to do so.
However, even this was not always enough. In 1993, a majority on the Supreme Court refused a request for a stay of execution so that evidence of possible innocence of a condemned man in Texas, Leonel Herrera, could be examined. The new evidence had come to light some eight years after Herrera’s trial. On appeal, six members of the Supreme Court concluded the threshold for mandating such a review was “extraordinarily high.” In Herrera’s case it had not been met. If the Court granted this request, six justices concluded, more would surely follow and the system would fall of its own weight.
Of this Blackmun wrote: “Of one thing I am certain, just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.”
The last words of Leonel Herrera (#53), executed January 25, 1993:
"I am innocent, innocent, innocent. Make no mistake about this; I owe society nothing. Continue the struggle for human rights, helping those who are innocent, especially Mr. Graham. I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight. May God bless you all. I am ready."
On June 12, 2000 three colleagues, working at Columbia University Law School and New York University’s Sociology Department, released: "A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995". The executive summary was clear and direct. Serious, documented, reversible errors had been found in 68% of the 4,500 (plus) cases since capital punishment had been reinstated.
In January 2000, after the 13th inmate had been released from death row due to wrongful conviction. Governor Ryan of Illinois declared a moratorium, saying:
"Our capital [punishment] system is haunted by the demon of error, error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die. What effect was race having? What effect was poverty having? Because of all these reasons, today I am commuting the sentences of all Death Row inmates."
Since 1995, the murder rate in states with the death penalty (of which there are only 35), has remained on average 40% than in states without it. Not to mention other countries where capital punishment has been abolished entirely.
Perhaps most recently is the case of Cameron Todd Willingham. In 1991 there was a fire at his home. He got out alive, but his three daughters died. He was tried for arson and the murder of his three children, though he maintained innocence, saying he was asleep at the time the fire started. He was found guilty and sentenced to die. However, later, starting in 2004, arson scientists and members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission reviewed the case and concluded the arson conviction was based on bad science. Just before the Texas Forensic Science commission was to hear a report on the accuracy of the conviction, Texas governor Rick Perry replaced members of the Commission, postponing the report indefinitely. As a result, no appeal was able to be entered, and Willingham was executed. Needless to say, I am not going to be voting for Mr. Perry in the 2010 election he wants so badly to win.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Perry#Cameron_Todd_Willingham
Killing is wrong, I don't care who is doing it.
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