My Barack Wish List

[miraja2]

Originally Posted by ddthetide

stop all the appeals that drag on for 15-20 years. kill'em, cremate'm and stop wasting the money.

There was a guy awhile ago here in Illinois named Anthony Porter. He was on death row for something like 15 years. Then, two days before he was scheduled to be executed, his lawyers won some sort of stay of execution after finally uncovering some kind of new evidence. Death penalty advocates moaned about the never ending appeals process and the fact that a new investigation was being launched.
Later on, it turned out that Porter was found to be innocent. Some other guy confessed to the crime and everything.

Are you saying it would be better if Porter had simply been executed right away....before nasty things like the actual facts of the case got involved?
And by the way, Porter is just one of many: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/inno...reed-death-row

Some of the interesting stuff is at the bottom:
Average number of years between being sentenced to death and exoneration: 9.5 years
Number of cases in which DNA played a substantial factor in establishing innocence: 17


It makes me wonder how many people were executed for crimes they didn't do in the era BEFORE DNA testing, and how many might be executed now, before some future technology is developed that we don't yet know about.

[brianwspencer]

Originally Posted by miraja2

There was a guy awhile ago here in Illinois named Anthony Porter. He was on death row for something like 15 years. Then, two days before he was scheduled to be executed, his lawyers won some sort of stay of execution after finally uncovering some kind of new evidence. Death penalty advocates moaned about the never ending appeals process and the fact that a new investigation was being launched.
Later on, it turned out that Porter was found to be innocent. Some other guy confessed to the crime and everything.

Are you saying it would be better if Porter had simply been executed right away....before nasty things like the actual facts of the case got involved?
And by the way, Porter is just one of many: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/inno...reed-death-row

Some of the interesting stuff is at the bottom:
Average number of years between being sentenced to death and exoneration: 9.5 years
Number of cases in which DNA played a substantial factor in establishing innocence: 17


It makes me wonder how many people were executed for crimes they didn't do in the era BEFORE DNA testing, and how many might be executed now, before some future technology is developed that we don't yet know about.

Remember this well.....