Just in case any of you still think the death penalty is a good idea, let me go ahead and make it a tiny bit harder for you to defend that position.
More than 2,000 people have been freed from prison since 1989 after they were found to have been wrongly convicted of serious crimes, according to a new National Registry of Exonerations compiled by University of Michigan Law School and Northwestern University.
Its sponsors say it is by far the largest database of such cases, and they hope it will help reveal why the criminal justice system sometimes misfires, prosecuting and convicting the innocent.
The registry covers the period since DNA came into common use and revealed, to the surprise of many prosecutors and judges, that a significant number of convicted rapists and murderers were innocent.
The Innocence Project in New York says DNA alone has freed 289 prisoners since 1989.
Naturally, these are just the ones they know about right now. How many more “solved” cases are out there, just waiting for the truth to somehow get around to them?
The justice system isn’t perfect and is going to get it wrong now and then, but how do you justify killing somebody because of that mistake? You can’t. The death penalty is morally wrong on its face since it’s nothing but state sanctioned murder, but when you add the innocence layer to it especially to such an alarming degree it’s even worse. There’s no room for an eye for an eye when there was no eye to begin with.
You can read the full story here.
Agreed and I’ve been fighting this battle for years. We have a Proposition for the November election to get rid of the death penalty in CA. More states are joining in but we’ll never convince the south. If we get one more vote on the Supreme Court, it can probably be overturned nationally. It’s giving us a blac
k eye to the rest of the world.