Texas Windshield Murder Trial Begins (page 16)

Realist

in order that nobody can pretend the numbers about errors and successful appeals in capital punishment cases support the current system - here are the statistics from the famous Liebman study (Columbia University) as well as links to a frontline article and another .org site containing interesting summaries.

these numbers together with all the other statistics and ethical problems associated with CP show clearly that death row is indefensible. therefore it is very positive that liberals and their ideas are getting more and more saying on this issue.

ignorance is not always bliss - at least not when it can cause innocent victims.

http://www2.law.columbia.edu/brokensystem2/

A Broken System, Part II: Why There Is So Much Error in Capital Cases,
and What Can Be Done About It

James LiebmanSimon H. Rifkind Professor of Law Columbia Law School		Jeffrey Fagan Professor Columbia Law School & Joseph Mailman School of Public Health
Andrew Gelman Professor of Statistics Columbia University		Valerie West Research Associate, Columbia Law School Doctoral Candidate, Department of Sociology, New York University
Garth Davies Research Associate, The Institute on Crime, Justice and Corrections George Washington University		Alexander Kiss Doctoral Candidate, Dept. of Biostatistics Columbia University

ALL MEDIA PLEASE CONTACT: Hayley Miller, (212) 854-2604
Jim Fox, (212) 854-2156

IF YOU ARE NOT A MEMBER OF THE MEDIA, PLEASE CONTACT:Heather Emswiler, (212) 854-2650

CLICK HERE to enter A Broken System, Part II website

Click here to read A Broken System, Part II in PDF format

CLICK HERE to go to A Broken System, Part II Appendices on the web

Click here to read A Broken System, Part II Appendices in PDF format

CLICK HERE to read updated information as of May 13, 2002

CLICK HERE to read A Broken System, the first report on error rates in capital cases, released in June 2000

To order printed copies of A Broken System, Parts I or II, click here.

CLICK HERE to watch streaming video of Professor James Liebman discussing the report.

http://www.law.columbia.edu/media_inquiries/news/2002/broken_system?#rtregion:main

Appendix A: National and State Capital Punichment Report Cards

National Composite Capital Punishment Report Card

History

First Death Sentence	1973
First Direct Appeal	1973
First Consensual Execution	1977
First Non-Consensual Execution	1979
Years From First Death Sentence to First Non-Consensual Execution	6
Average Years From Sentence to Execution	9
Average Years From Sentence to Final Federal Relief	8.58

Sentences and Executions

Total Number of Death Sentences	5,826
Total Number of Executions	313
Percentage of Death Sentences Carried Out	5%

Error Rates

State Direct Appeal

Number Reviewed on Direct Appeal	4,546
Number Reversed on Direct Appeal	1,852
Percentage Reversed on Direct Appeal	41%
Number Awaiting Direct Appeal	1,280
Percentage Awaiting Direct Appeal	22%
Number Forward to State Post-Conviction	2,694

State Post-Conviction

Number Reviewed on Post-Conviction	Unknown
Number Reversed on Post-Conviction	$257
Percentage Reversed on Post-Conviction	$10%
Number Forward to Federal Habeas Corpus	Unknown

State Direct Appeal and State Post-Conviction Combined (28 States)

Overall Rate of Error Found by State Courts

$46%

Error Rates

Federal Habeas Corpus (28 States)

Number Reviewed on Habeas	598
Number Reversed on Habeas	240
Percentage Reversed on Habeas	40%

Overall Rates Including [and Excluding] State Post-Conviction (28 States)

Overall Error Rate	68% [65%]
Overall Success Rate	32% [35%]

Sources : DRCen; Death Row U.S.A., Winter 2000; DADB; HCDB; Appendix

Table A-1: State-by-State Comparisons of Direct Appeal,
State Post-Conviction, and Federal Habeas Corpus
Reversal Rates and Overall Error Rates

State	% Reversed on State Direct Appeal	% Reversed on State Post- Conviction*	% Reversed in State Courts, Overall*	Percent Reversed on Federal Habeas Corpus	Overall Error Rate, Excluding State PC	Overall Error Rate, Including State PC*
Alabama	54	9	58	45	75	77
Arizona	41	11	48	60	77	79
Arkansas	40	4	43	48	69	70
California	32	4	35	80	86	87
Colorado	75	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Connecticut	100	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Delaware	30	unknown	unknown	0	30	unknown
Florida	50	17	58	39	69	75
Georgia	36	12	44	65	78	80
Idaho	40	5	43	67	80	81
Illinois	39	10	46	30	58	62
Indiana	27	27	46	50	63	73
Kentucky	52	0	52	100	100	100
Louisiana	47	5	50	27	61	63
Maryland	53	48	75	100	100	100
Mississippi	57	26	68	76	90	92
Missouri	17	5	21	15	30	33
Montana	15	9	23	75	79	81
Nebraska	36	14	45	43	64	69
Nevada	30	7	35	50	65	68
New Jersey	87	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
New Mexico	25	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
No. Carolina	59	10	63	18	67	70
Ohio	24	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Oklahoma	46	2	47	50	73	74
Oregon	88	NA	NA	NA	NA	NA
Pennsylvania	29	1	30	33	53	53
So. Carolina	54	18	62	14	60	67
Tennessee	29	16	41	100	100	100
Texas	30	6	34	25	48	51
Utah	36	21	50	33	58	67
Virginia	8	3	11	7	14	17
Washington	25	unknown	unknown	67	75	Unknown
Wyoming	25	33	50	50	63	75

* Because state post-conviction data are incomplete, the figures in these columns are in most cases lower than the actual figure. See infra Appendix C, pp. C-1 to C-2.

Sources: DADB, DRCen, Appendix C, HCDB

FRONTLINE

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/smith/etc/links.html

Reporting from The Miami Herald on the Frank Lee Smith Case and Florida's Flawed Criminal Justice System
	For 14 Years, Justice Failed A Man Condemned To Die "[T]he Smith conviction stands as a stunning miscarriage of justice ... [He] languished through 14 years of distortions, delays, omissions and misrepresentations. The entire justice system failed him." (June 25, 2001)
	Scenario Can't Justify Condemning Wrong Man "It's easy to understand why Frank Lee Smith was a prime suspect. Here was some nasty, incoherent ex-con with two previous murder raps on his record (which the prosecution managed to get before the jury, wiping out any lingering doubts by the jurors about his guilt in this case). A witness tells police she thinks she saw this ex-con at the murder scene. Actual evidence became unnecessary." (July 8, 2001)
	Cries of Innocence by 'Killer' Cleared by DNA Went Unheard "In a letter from Death Row, Smith wrote, "Dying for a crime someone else's hands committed is the thought that (has) killed me already." Nobody listened. Until Thursday, that is, when it was learned that FBI tests had shown that Smith's DNA does not match semen found on the body of the 8-year-old victim." (Dec. 16, 2000)

One Detective's Behavior Reveals Larger Truths
"[T]he formula that the Broward Sheriff's Office employed to convict Frank Lee Smith -- bullying witnesses into false identification and extracting a "confession" from an innocent man -- takes on an unsettling familiarity." (March 4, 2001)

	Op Ed: DNA's Corollary "[I]f no one will be held accountable for Frank Lee Smith's life and death in prison, police and prosecutors need to take to heart its lessons about the fragility of justice and how they crushed it 14 years ago by not looking further for a suspect." (July 11, 2001)
	Florida's Flawed Death Sentences Lead U.S. "Florida is home to five of 15 counties that impose the death penalty most frequently across America, ranking it among a handful of states at highest risk for wrongful convictions and making it the nation's leader in sending innocent people to Death Row. Those are the conclusions of a Columbia University Law School team in its massive study released in early February 2002." (Feb. 11, 2002)
	Handling Of Behan Case Part Of A Pattern, BSO Critics Say "Most of the investigators who built the disputed cases remain in positions of authority at Broward Sheriff's Office. Their personnel files brim with letters of congratulation for the arrests." (March 4, 2002)
	Broward To Review DNA Of 28 Death Row Inmates "The rush toward DNA analysis of criminal cases in Broward began in December, when genetic testing cleared Frank Lee Smith. Concern escalated with accusations that a Broward Sheriff's homicide investigator, Richard Scheff, had lied under oath in the Smith case. Scheff's role in that conviction is under investigation." (May 5, 2001)
Other Readings on the U.S. Criminal Justice System
	'A Broken System, Part II' This summarizes the second part of an in-depth analysis of the death penalty in America, conducted by researchers at Columbia University's Law School and released in February 2002. (It is often referred to as the "Liebman study," after law professor and co-author James Liebman.) The authors address two questions: Why is there so much error in the death-penalty system? And how can those errors be prevented? Read the section on how errors plaguing America's capital punishment system have weakened public support for capital punishment, even among its most steadfast defenders, and how political support for the death penalty is waning, with major campaigns against the death penalty now being waged in 20 states. Statistics and facts are cited supporting this conclusion. Read the section where the authors concede that their study under-reports the errors in capital-punishment cases. This section specifically cites the case of Frank Lee Smith as an example. Because the courts never determined that "serious error" led to Smith's incarceration, the authors were not able to count his case as one of the many wrongful convictions. Finally, the first part of the study, released in June 2000, found that of the 4,578 capital sentences that were appealed from 1973 to 1995, fully 68 percent were overturned by higher courts due to "serious error" -- errors that were mostly due to the defendants' "egregiously incompetent" legal representation and/or the suppression of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors and law-enforcement officials.
	"The Myth of Fingerprints: DNA and the End of Innocence" Writer Gregg Easterbrook in this 2000 New Republic article argues that expanding the use of DNA evidence in the criminal justice system should give opponents of the death penalty pause. That's because while DNA testing might free some on death row who are wrongly convicted, the broad use of the tests will help make Americans more comfortable with the death penalty since many of the tests will indeed confirm the convict is guilty.
	ProDeathPenalty.com: Responses to the Liebman Report ProDeathPenalty.com is administered by Justice For All, a group that lobbies on crime reform issues. This page of its website includes various material analyzing why the death penalty is warranted and why attacks on it in recent years are unjustified. In particular, this site offers in here in this section responses to "A Broken System," the 2002 report co-authored by Jim Liebman at Columbia University that chronicles the many serious errors that have plagued capital-punishment cases throughout the country.
	Trial and Error: How Prosecutors Sacrifice Justice to Win A five-part series (published Jan. 10-14, 1999), this Chicago Tribune investigation found that since 1963, 381 people convicted of homicide had their verdicts overturned because of prosecutorial misconduct. (Sixty-seven of those 381 were sentenced to death.) In "Break Rules, Be Promoted," the authors describe a system whereby three Cook County, Ill., prosecutors who had received harsh rebukes from the Illinois Appellate Court for misconduct had been subsequently promoted and even elected judges. Other articles in the series trace some of the worst cases of prosecutorial misconduct on record. (*Registration required)
	Win At All Costs In this 10-part series (Nov-Dec. 1998), a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigative team reports on alleged judicial misconduct and a "law enforcement culture that has allowed the pursuit of a conviction to replace the pursuit of justice, no matter what the cost."
	The Wrong Man In this in-depth November 1999 report in The Atlantic Monthly, author Alan Berlow describes several cases in which innocent men were sentenced to death, and then ultimately exonerated. Berlow argues that inept defense attorneys, dishonest police and prosecutors -- who may or may not believe they have the culprit, racial bias, false confessions, eyewitness error, and an appeals process that's becoming increasingly inaccessible, are the many factors to blame for miscarriages of justice.
	Railroaded In this August 2000 American Lawyer article, author Steve Weinberg chronicles the case of Ellen Reasonover, who was wrongly convicted of murder and served 16 years in prison. He describes how one dogged defense attorney became convinced that the prosecutor had allowed false testimony at Reasonover's trial and had misled the jury in his closing argument.
Two Groups Involved in Criminal Justice and Capital Punishment Issues

The Moratorium Campaign
Sister Helen Prejean, author of "Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States," is chair of the Moratorium Campaign, a nonprofit organization that seeks to obtain a moratorium on the death penalty. Through the "State Counts" section of the campaign's website, you can find information about your state's position on the death penalty, along with other information such as whether your state will execute a mentally retarded person, how many people on death row have been exonerated, the race of death row inmates, and other data.

The Innocence Project
A nonprofit legal clinic at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City, the Innocence Project's goal is to give pro bono legal assistance to inmates who are challenging their convictions based on DNA testing of evidence. The website for the Innocence Project also publishes information about all types of wrongful convictions, including articles such as "Causes and Remedies of Wrongful Convictions" and "Police and Prosecutorial Misconduct."

http://www.lutins.org/death-p.html

The Death Penalty: Indefensible!

by allen lutins

On 11 June 2000 Columbia University released a study that found that, of 4,578 death penalty appeals in the U.S. between 1973 and 1995, a full two-thirds were successful. According to Professor James Liebman, the principle author, many of the appeals were granted because the original trials were "serious flawed." The fact that innocent lives have been and will continue to be snufed out by "capital punishment" is reviving a discussion in this country of the death penalty; in the past few years, Governor George Ryan of Illinois and Governor Parris Glendening of Maryland both imposed state-wide moratoriums on capital punishment. On 1 July 2002 U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff ruled the Federal Death Penalty Act unconsitutional because of "an undue risk of executing innocent people," and recently the Supreme Court reminded us that "in recent years a disturbing number of inmates on death row have been exonerated."

Why is "capital punishment" (what a farcical euphemism!) still legal in this country when it's been outlawed in virtually every other industrialized nation (and even most non-industrialized nations)?!? Basically, it's a political symbol - supporting the death penalty is a way for politicians to say, "I'm tough on criminals."

Other excuses are often provided, but a little analysis reveals that they're totally bogus. Saving money is a common one (as if that's something worth taking a life for!); some claim that incarceration for life is too expensive. But this isn't necessarily so; the legal costs of invoking the death penalty are exorbitant. The money spent on public defenders, district attorneys, judges, court paperwork and segregation of prisoners on death row can easily cover the costs of life imprisonment; Time magazine reported in 1971 that the commutation of death sentences of 15 Arkansas prisoners saved the state an estimated $1.5 million, and The Sacramento Bee estimated that California spent $1 billion on death-row cases between 1977 and 1993, only to execute two people during that period.

The other most common argument is that the death penalty is a more potent crmie deterrent. If life in prison without parole isn't enough of a deterrent, do you think that the death penalty will be? Murderers are not rational people who conscientiously consider the consequences of their actions. The claim that the death penalty is more of a deterrent to crime than life imprisonment is hogwash. In 1974, states with the death penalty had an average murder rate of 9.3 per 100,000 population, whereas states without it had an average rate of 5.8. None of the states with the six lowest murder rates had death penalty laws. And over the past few decades dozens of researchers have unsuccessfully analyzed crime statistics for evidence that capital punishment affects the crime rate. After reviewing some of these studies in 1976, the United State Supreme Court found no conclusive evidence that the death penalty deters violent crime. The United Nations had already come to the same conclusion in their 1968 report Capital Punishment, which noted: "Examination of the number of murders before and after the abolition of the death penalty does not support the theory that capital punishment has a unique deterrent effect. Nowhere has abolition been followed by an otherwise inexplicable rise in the murder rate; nowhere has reintroduction been followed by an otherwise inexplicable decline in the murder rate."

Now, here's my biggest beef about the death penalty - PEOPLE MAKES MISTAKES! Because of this, many innocent people have been executed in this country. Two separate studies conducted in 1987 by The Stanford Law Review and Tufts University found that 350 people sentenced to death in this century were later proven innocent, including 23 who were actually executed. Want some examples? Timothy Evans, whose execution sparked outrage in Great Britain and led to the abolition of capital punishment there; Lloyd Eldon Miller, on death row for 11 years in Illinois, found innocent ONE DAY before his scheduled execution; Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee, sentenced to the electric chair in Florida in 1963, proven innocent in 1975, after spending 12 years in prison; Randal Dale Adams, who spent 12 years in a Texas prison and James Richardson 25 years in a Florida jail, both on death row for crimes they did not commit, only to be spared (like to Pitts and Lee) by a court-imposed moratorium on executions. Sometimes the government changes its mind: In 1977, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty is excessively harsh punishment for the crime of rape - a little late for the 455 men executed for that crime since 1930. As of this writing, 89 people have been released from death row after evidence surfaced exonerating them; how many of the thousands on death row now are innocent as well? And how many will be executed because they ran out of time, or because no DNA was available to prove their innocence?

Fact is, the death penalty is WRONG! You don't kill people to demonstrate that killing is wrong; otherwise, the government would rape rapists and burn down arsonists' homes.

For more information about the death penalty, see the following:

A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995 (report commissioned by the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary)
Dr. Frank Schmalleger's Cybrary: Death Penalty Links
Clark County, Indiana Prosecuting Attorney's "1000+ Death Penalty Links"
Cornell Law School Death Penalty Project

nilfun

7. The State's Refusal to Test DNA
The defense filed many motions requesting DNA testing for Frank Lee Smith. The first such request came in 1998, after advanced DNA testing was permitted in the courts. Some DNA material still existed in the case of Shandra Whitehead. At first the state agreed to the tests, thinking that with the upcoming evidentiary hearing on Chiquita Lowe's recantation, they needed something to bolster their case against Smith as much as possible.
However, prosecutors subsequently found Lowe's testimony at the hearing unimpressive and they decided to deny the DNA testing. Observers like law professor Jonathan Simon condemn the state's decision, saying that once prosecutors knew that they had not lost the death sentence in the hearing, they simply didn't want to take the chance of losing it because of the DNA.
For the next year, motions were filed by the defense. There were objections from the state and more defense filings were made, but there was no ruling from the judge. It would take DNA tests implicating Eddie Lee Mosley in rape and murders throughout the area to force the state prosecutors to finally stop fighting DNA testing for Frank Lee Smith. But by the time they did so, he had already died of cancer on death row.

Chilling.

Thanks for those links, Realist.

wednesday

http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/Liebman/Liebman.htm

and here are some rebutal essays to your link, Realist.

Realist

nilfun,

thank you for your post! its good to see that there are people who realize that there is a huge problem with the current system! excellent link by the way!

wednesday,

let me say two things about your link.

a) lets suppose the liebman study is indeed not 100% accurate (an accusation that is not supported by hard numbers (at least not on the page that you posted)) but exaggerates by a factor of 2. in this case not over 2/3 of the cases but "ONLY" 1/3 of the cases are questionable! still a gigantic number of erroneous cases!

b) the second headline on your page has the title: We're Not Executing the Innocent.

now compare this with the illinois death row that had to be cleared! after DNA test became available it became clear that several cases had to be dismissed! these people would have been killed if DNA test were not available and is very well possible that innocent people had been executed previously.

http://archive.aclu.org/issues/death/17exonerated.html

The 17 Innocent People Who Lived

"Thanks to Modern Science, 17 Innocent People Have been Removed from Death Row." They are:
1. Jonathan Treadway -- Arizona Convicted: 1975 Released: 1978 Convicted of sodomy and first-degree murder of a six-year-old and sentenced to death. The jury acquitted him of all charges at retrial after five pathologists testified that the victim probably died of natural causes and that there was no evidence of sodomy.
2. Johnny Ross -- Louisiana Convicted: 1975 Released: 1981 Sentenced to death for rape. He was released when his blood type was found to be inconsistent with that of the rapist.
3. Henry Drake -- Georgia Convicted: 1977 Released: 1987 Resentenced to a life sentence at his second retrial. Six months later, the parole board freed him, convinced of his innocence by his alleged accomplice and by testimony from the medical examiner.
4. John Henry Knapp -- Arizona Convicted: 1974 Released: 1987 Knapp was originally sentenced to death for the arson murder of his two children. He was released in 1987 after new scientific evidence about the cause of the fire prompted a judge to order a new trial. In 1991, his third trial resulted in a hung jury. Knapp was again released in 1992 after an agreement with the prosecutors in which he pleaded no contest to second degree murder. He has steadfastly maintained his innocence.
5. Kirk Bloodsworth -- Maryland Convicted: 1984 Released: 1993 Convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a young girl. Years later, a new volunteer lawyer had the girl's underwear tested with a new DNA testing technique that was not available at the original trial. The tests showed that the semen stains on the underwear could not have come from Bloodsworth.
6. Gregory R. Wilhoit -- Oklahoma Convicted: 1987 Released: 1993 Convicted of killing his estranged wife while she slept. His conviction was overturned and he was released in 1991 when 11 forensic experts testified that a bite mark found on his dead wife did not belong to him. The appeals court also found "ineffective assistance of counsel." He was acquitted at a retrial in April 1993.
7. Earl Washington -- Virginia Convicted: 1984 Commuted to life: 1994 Washington is mentally retarded. After he was arrested on another charge in 1983, police convinced him to make a statement concerning the rape and murder of a woman in 1982. He later recanted that statement. Subsequent DNA tests confirmed that Washington did not rape the victim. Shortly before leaving office in 1994, Governor Wilder commuted Washington's sentence to life with the possibility of parole. He remains incarcerated.
8. Adolph Munson -- Oklahoma Convicted: 1985 Released: 1995 Munson's conviction was unanimously overturned by Oklahoma's highest criminal appeals court in December 1994 because the state had withheld material evidence tending to exonerate Munson. Some of the forensic evidence that was used at trial to convict Munson was provided by Dr. Ralph Erdmann, who was subsequently convicted of seven felony counts involving misrepresentation of facts in other cases and stripped of his license. Munson was acquitted at a re-trial in April 1995.
9. Rolando Cruz -- Illinois Convicted: 1985 Released: 1995
10. Alejandro Hernandez -- Illinois Convicted: 1985 Released: 1995 In 1985, Cruz and Hernandez were jointly tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico. In September 1995, DNA tests showed that neither Cruz nor Hernandez was the source of the semen found at the crime scene. On November 3, 1995, a DuPage County judge acquitted Cruz on the basis of a recanted testimony (by a sheriff's department lieutenant) and the DNA evidence. Hernandez's case was also dismissed.
11. Sabrina Butler -- Mississippi Convicted: 1990 Released: 1995 Butler was sentenced to death in 1990, for the murder of her nine-month-old child. Upon re-trial, she was acquitted on Dec. 17, 1995. Medical evidence indicated that her baby died from cystic kidney disease or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and was not the result of any action on Butler's part.
12. Verneal Jimerson -- Illinois Convicted: 1985 Released: 1996 Jimerson was sentenced to death in 1985 for a murder that occurred in 1978. The chief witness against him was Paula Gray, who did not mention Jimerson in her original story to the police. Then she added his name to her account, along with three other names, including Dennis Williams (see below). She later recanted her entire testimony, saying the police had forced her to lie. The original charges against Jimerson were dismissed, but they were resurrected seven years later when the police offered to drop some charges against Gray if she would implicate Jimerson. Gray's 50-year sentence was converted to two years’ probation. In 1995, the Illinois Supreme Court unanimously reversed Jimerson's conviction, in part due to DNA evidence demonstrating that he was not involved in the crime. Jimerson was released on bond in early 1996, and charges against him were subsequently dropped.
13. Dennis Williams -- Illinois Convicted: 1979 Released: 1996 Convicted in 1979 for murder and rape. Williams spent 17 years on death row until his release in 1996 when DNA evidence cleared him of charges.
14. Robert Hayes -- Florida Convicted: 1991 Released: 1997 Hayes was convicted of the rape and murder of a co-worker based partly on faulty DNA evidence. The Florida Supreme Court threw out Hayes's conviction and the DNA evidence in 1995. The victim had been found clutching hairs probably from her assailant. The hairs were from a white man, whereas Hayes is black. Hayes was acquitted at a retrial in July 1997.
15. Robert Lee Miller, Jr.-- Oklahoma Convicted: 1988 Released: 1998 Miller was convicted of the rape and murder of two elderly women in 1988. However, recent DNA evidence points to another defendant who was already incarcerated on similar charges. Oklahoma County Special Judge Larry Jones dismissed the charges against Miller in February, 1997, saying that there was not enough evidence to justify his continued imprisonment. Miller's original conviction was overturned in 1995, and he was granted a new trial. The prosecution is appealing Judge Jones's ruling.
16. Ronald Williamson -- Oklahoma Convicted: 1988 Released: 1999 Ronald Williamson and Dennis Fritz were charged with the murder and rape of Deborah Sue Carter, which occurred in 1982. They were arrested four years after the crime. Both were convicted and Williamson was sentenced to death. In 1997, a federal appeals court overturned Williamson's conviction on the basis of "ineffectiveness of counsel." The court noted that the lawyer had failed to investigate and present to the jury the fact that another man had confessed to the crime. Recently, DNA tests from the crime scene did not match either Williamson or Fritz, but did implicate Glen Gore, a former suspect in the case. All charges against the two defendants were dismissed on April 15, 1999 and they were released.
17. Ronald Jones -- Illinois Convicted: 1989 Released: 1999 Jones was convicted for the rape and murder of a mother of three. After spending ten years on death row, he was released when DNA evidence proved he was not guilty.

Realist

PS: there is a lot of evidence against CP but there is no hard evidence that CP reduces crime. the US states without CP actually have a lower murder rate than the states with CP (except washington DC). also europe that has very liberal laws in comparison with the US has a dramatically lower murder rate.

wednesday

http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/DPIC.htm http://www.prodeathpenalty.com/illinois.htm

here is some more discussion,

also, if u click to "home" it has some very intersting related articles.

always two sides to a story

Realist

wednesday,

yes there are two sides to everything...but one has to look who has the stronger arguments.

the first link states that ONLY 34 (!!!!) man on death row were actually innocent while the others where still criminals though not deserving of a death sentence. so at least 34 innocent people would have gotten killed! compared with the 313 executions that went through thats an enormous percentage. how can you justify that? imagine it would be your child that gets executed by the state? what a declaration of bankrupcy for a state!

the second article critisized the clearing of the death row in illinois. yet it fails to address the fact that 8 innocent man were sitting in death row. how valid is a page that plays down the killing of innocent man?

also and that is a VERY important point - CP does not lower murder rate. at least no statistics i have ever seen can link the two issues. and thats not surprising....if someone is not deterred by life in prision he is most likely not deterred by CP either.

Thunder Rider

Cost of housing a convicted pedophile $50.00 a day $18,250.00 a year for a 30 year sentence $547,500.00

Item	Cost
Overtime Payroll for Execution Team	$ 6,227
Phone Installations	$ 7,290
Drugs	$ 122
Intravenous Supplies	$ 67
Maintenance	$ 3,093
TOTAL	$16,799

Cost to the victim of a re-offending parole = immesurable

% of excuted deviants that re-offend is ZERO = Priceless

Realist

thunder,

According to Richard Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., the most comprehensive cost study was published by Duke University researchers in 1993. This two-year study determined North Carolina's capital cases cost at least an extra $2.16 million per execution, compared to what taxpayers would have spent if defendants were tried without the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison. Applying those figures nationally would mean $1.69 billion were spent on the 784 executions carried out nationwide since 1976 (in 1993 dollars).

2.16 million / 18250/year = 118 years.

plus the immeasurable cost of an innocent life possibly taken by death row.

so even if you assume the prisoner does not have to work and thus does not contribute anything to pay for his costs it is still cheaper to sentence him to life in prison than to execute him.

by the way - nobody says dangerous individuals should be released - thus your comment <Cost to the victim of a re-offending parole = immesurable> does not apply.

Texas Windshield Murder Trial Begins

SheilaM

Realist

A Broken System, Part II: Why There Is So Much Error in Capital Cases,
and What Can Be Done About It

Appendix A: National and State Capital Punichment Report Cards

The Death Penalty: Indefensible!

by allen lutins

For more information about the death penalty, see the following:

nilfun

wednesday

Realist

The 17 Innocent People Who Lived

Realist

wednesday

Realist

Thunder Rider

Item

Cost

Overtime Payroll for Execution Team

Realist

Share this

Texas Windshield Murder Trial Begins

A Broken System, Part II: Why There Is So Much Error in Capital Cases, and What Can Be Done About It

Appendix A: National and State Capital Punichment Report Cards

The Death Penalty: Indefensible!

by allen lutins

For more information about the death penalty, see the following:

The 17 Innocent People Who Lived

Item

Cost

Overtime Payroll for Execution Team

Share this

A Broken System, Part II: Why There Is So Much Error in Capital Cases,
and What Can Be Done About It