Yes, LPS5 and some of the others have done a good job of cutting through some of the nonsense, misinformation, and addled thinking that has been using the oxygen on this thread!
We are all aware of the many wrongful convictions that have been overturned solely on the basis of DNA evidence. Likewise, both Canada and the United States provide many instances of this modern technique having sometimes prevented the tragedy of the inhuman termination of innocent human life.
In those cases where DNA has been the only evidence capable of overturning a wrongful conviction, it follows that all those poor devils would have otherwise been executed...eventually. Look at the 13 on death row in 2000 in Illinois who were saved by DNA testing? So what happened to such people before DNA testing was developed as a silent and invisible witness to murder...these people of whom fully 90% could not afford their own lawyer. What happened indeed! Out of the 13000 + people executed in the US, common logic suggests that at least several hundred were innocent. Over 100 people have had their convictions reversed since 1973 alone...and one wonders when people even started giving a damn what was happening to the poor and those without any social roots or connections.
Rational people may not pretend that wrongful convictions only began with the advent of DNA testing! Such an idea is as ludicrous as the idea that all witches executed were evil servants or spawn of the devil! Intelligent people understand that human beings have been wrongfully convicted since the day the first dung beetle pushed the sun across the sky. To suggest that all of the wrongfully convicted are discovered and released is to argue the infallibility of human nature--an idiotic premise, but one which will undoubtedly attract adherents on this thread.
The truth is that since the dawn of time the wrongfully convicted (whether from error or evil) have been hanged, electrocuted, shot, knifed, crushed, poisoned, burned alive, stoned, guillotined, gassed, disembowelled, and otherwise inconvenienced.
Police, crown, witnesses, jurors, and you and I have all suffered from the defects common to humanity: prejudice, bias, racial discrimination, hatred, classism, covering up for family, friends, associates, self, or other. And as Machiavelli said so well: the State seeks to perpetuate itself--often by criminal means. Those people who believe that many of the wrongfully convicted are not wrongfully executed are wilfully blind. And if they believe that AND that O.J. Simpson was guilty...then they are not only blind but irrational as all Hell.
Justice William O. Douglas noted in Furman, "One searches our chronicles in vain for the execution of any member of the affluent strata in this society." Woman commit 15% of homicides but only 1% on death row are woman. A dependable system?!!
Gross and Mauro state after their research on the death penalty and discrimination: "Whatever else might be said for the use of death as a punishment, one lesson is clear from experience: this is a power that we cannot exercise fairly and without discrimination."
When innocent people are killed, the guilty remain to very possibly commit further crimes of rape, murder, and the like. The State, the relatives, and the socially conscientious seldom seek the evidence to acquit the memory of the dead person. Life goes on, and the dead person will never hug a spouse or child again regardless of any effort made by the living.
The research by Michael L. Radelet, Hugo Adam Bedau, and Constance Putnam in 1987 in the Stanford Law Review identified 23 people who were wrongfully convicted and executed.
mitglied.lycos.de
As to the "deterrence" argument: there is no evidence of any kind that the death penalty is a deterrent. Indeed, the 12 States who have abolished the death penalty have approximately half the per capita murders as their death penalty counterparts. Canada's murder rate went down something like 30% since abolishing the death penalty (there were at least 5 wrongfully convicted for murder and released on DNA or other evidence. If they had been executed there would obviously have been no or little effort put into fighting the system for years or decades in order to exonerate them).
As for the "argument" that executing people is a deterrent to the executed person killing again...well, this is the Internet after all. People will say foolish things. The concept of deterrence requires there to be alternate choices such that one can determine how freely chosen acts are affected by social policy. Dead people do not have choices so the idea of deterrence does not enter into the picture. Killing people makes them incapable of doing everything. So what else is new?
In the U.S. Over 13,000 people have been executed. If only 5% were wrongfully convicted, that leaves 650 innocent people robbed of their only chance at life and love.
Here is a more detailed look at the wrongful execution of James Adams in Florida in 1984: This "nigger" as both the defense and prosecution called him was clearly railroaded. The State (among many other criminal acts) suppressed the exonerationg evidence of somebody else's hair being found in the victim's hand. The stats on unequal treatment are so incredibly telling that it is difficult to imagine a reasonable person being able to dismiss their relevance to the matter.
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