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Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (82779)	6/23/2000 5:54:00 PM
From: jbe	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 108807

Death Penalty: Examples of wrongfully convicted and executed. From ACLU Briefing Paper: The Death Penalty (1999): A study published in 1982 in the Stanford Law Review documents 350 capital convictions in which it was later proven that the convict had not committed the crime. Of those, 23 convicts were executed; others spent decades of their lives in prison. In a 1996 update of this study it was revealed that in the past few years alone, four individuals were executed although there was strong evidence that they were not guilty of the crime for which they were condemned. aclu.org Details of all cases of release of Death Row inmates since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976 are provided in a series of reports by the Death Penalty Information Center. (One was freed just two days before he was scheduled to be executed. Somebody else confessed just in time. A close shave!) The URL: essential.org Bear in mind that not all of the convicts found innocent were proven "factually" innocent. In those cases, someone else confessed to the crime, or DNA evidence proved they could not possibly have committed it, etc. In other cases, they were found "legally" innocent: their lawyers were totally incompetent, and botched the defense; exonerating evidence was withheld by the prosecution; etc. In short, their guilt was not proven "beyond a reasonable doubt." Given our system of justice's presumption of innocence, it is unlikely they would ever have been convicted in the first place, if the original trial had been conducted properly. Joan