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Pastimes : My House -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Original Mad Dog who wrote (4314)	1/7/2003 7:22:31 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7689

You just got a 100 points for intellectual honesty. The center doesn't vouch for the validity of the initial 68 cases. To be added to the center's ''innocents'' list, a condemned inmate must have his conviction overturned and be acquitted at retrial. Ex-prisoners also are added to the list if prosecutors don't pursue a retrial. Yeah. He got it. THERE REALLY ARE CASES WHICH ARE HEINOUS AND WE KNOW WHO DID IT, DN IT! How about an increased standard for a death penalty? Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. It has to be supported by reliable evidence. Fingerprints are a lot less reliable than though- -they are well short of 100%. They should corroborating evidence. If DNA evidence is available, it should be a legal requirement that it be tested and matched. n 1993, a U.S. House of Representatives panel led by a death-penalty foe, Rep. Don Edwards, D-Calif., found that 68 people had been released from wrongfully imposed death sentences during the previous 20 years. The report was the basis for the list of 102 ''innocents'' that anti-death penalty groups now promote. Edwards. Yeah. That tells me how much credence to give that. Ward Campbell, a deputy attorney general in California, said in a study last year that at least 68 of the 102 ex-death row inmates on the ''innocents'' list don't belong there. Campbell says some on the list had their convictions reversed because of prosecutors' errors or misconduct but seem certain to have committed the crimes of which they were convicted. Others avoided retrials or were acquitted because witnesses died, evidence was excluded for legal reasons, or because they were in prison for similar crimes. As I said. For Campbell, a recent addition to the list shows the problem with its standards: Larry Osborne was convicted of breaking into a Louisville couple's home in 1997 and killing them. He won a new trial because the conviction was based in part on grand jury testimony from an accomplice who died before Osborne's trial. An appeals court said the testimony should not have been admitted as evidence because Osborne's lawyer could not cross-examine the dead witness. Osborne was acquitted in a second trial. He made the ''innocents'' list in August. More of the same. The center doesn't vouch for the validity of the initial 68 cases. To be added to the center's ''innocents'' list, a condemned inmate must have his conviction overturned and be acquitted at retrial. Ex-prisoners also are added to the list if prosecutors don't pursue a retrial. Rather suspicious list, I'd say. The prosecutor says, "OH *! Every atty I've got has 20 cases he's working on and now we've got another. A murder trial yet. To H with it. Let 'im go." John McAdams, a political science professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee, acknowledges that African-Americans appear to be overrepresented on death row, where they account for about 42% of the prisoners, compared with about 12% of the U.S. population. (Since 1977, 57% of those executed have been white; 35% have been black.) McAdams notes the widely held belief that black defendants are more likely to receive the death penalty than whites convicted in similar slayings. But he says that doesn't take into account that blacks make up nearly 50% of all murder victims, and that all but a few are killed by other blacks. Blacks who kill blacks, he argues, are far less likely to get the death penalty than whites, blacks or Hispanics who kill whites. ''Why are the lives of black victims less valued?'' McAdams asks. ''There's a subtle kind of racism going on here, and it's got to do with the victims of crime, not how we treat the perpetrators.'' He realizes that his analysis has a provocative implication: that more black killers should be executed. He favors ''more executions generally.'' Yeah. But fellow death-penalty supporter Blecker says that the death penalty should be reserved for the ''worst of the worst, the ones almost everyone can agree are worthy.''* Which is what I said at the start. Death-penalty supporters also say there is plenty of evidence that executions deter homicides. A study last year by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta examined the nearly 6,000 death sentences imposed in the USA from 1977 through 1996. The authors compared changes in murder rates in 3,000 U.S. counties to the likelihood of being executed for murder in that county. They found that murder rates declined in counties where capital punishment was imposed. The researchers said a statistical formula suggested that each execution saved the lives of 18 potential victims. Recent studies at the University of Houston and at the University of Colorado at Denver had similar findings. Blecker, who is researching deterrence, says they square with what he found in interviews with 60 killers. ''They are cognizant of whether they are operating in a death-penalty state before they pull the trigger,'' he says. ''They're operating in the real world (news - Y! TV), not the realm of political theory.'' To McAdams, the debate over deterrence is unnecessary. ''If you execute a murderer and it stops other murders, you've saved innocent lives,'' he says. ''And if it doesn't, you've executed a murderer. Where's the problem?''