Did Texas Execute an Innocent Man?

Liebling

Liebling

Doesn't Need to be Spoonfed.
Valued Senior Member
It is 2009 and we are well into the 21st century. At this point in time 81 countries have completely abolished the death penalty in all cases, including murder and war crimes. A few countries keep capital punishment as a possiblity only in the cases of treason or horrendeous war crime. Many of the countries that still have the penalty of death in their laws as punishment, but none have actually handed down or communicated a death sentence in decades. To be a member in the European Union, the penalty must not be applied at all for membership into it's ranks.

With unwavering distincton the United States and China are the two countries that most frequently hand down and execute people for their crimes. Texas leads the US in number of inmates currently on death row, and number of inmates executed each year. Dubious honour;

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann?yrail

I don't expect many of you will take the time to read the 17 page report from the New Yorker, but it's tale is interesting.

Texas executed it's first scientifically proven innocent man in Feburary of 2004.

David Grann said:
In 2005, Texas established a government commission to investigate allegations of error and misconduct by forensic scientists. The first cases that are being reviewed by the commission are those of Willingham and Willis. In mid-August, the noted fire scientist Craig Beyler, who was hired by the commission, completed his investigation. In a scathing report, he concluded that investigators in the Willingham case had no scientific basis for claiming that the fire was arson, ignored evidence that contradicted their theory, had no comprehension of flashover and fire dynamics, relied on discredited folklore, and failed to eliminate potential accidental or alternative causes of the fire. He said that Vasquez’s approach seemed to deny “rational reasoning” and was more “characteristic of mystics or psychics.” What’s more, Beyler determined that the investigation violated, as he put it to me, “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.” The commission is reviewing his findings, and plans to release its own report next year. Some legal scholars believe that the commission may narrowly assess the reliability of the scientific evidence. There is a chance, however, that Texas could become the first state to acknowledge officially that, since the advent of the modern judicial system, it had carried out the “execution of a legally and factually innocent person.”
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More evidence on the Willingham Fire;
http://www.docstoc.com/docs/document-preview.aspx?doc_id=10401390
http://www.slate.com/id/2227222/
http://www.innocenceproject.org/docs/ArsonReviewReport.pdf

As of today, 249 people who were once sentenced to death in the United States have been completely exhonerated of their crimes due to new scientific evidence, police/judicial misconduct, or by false statements coerced from jailhouse testimony.

Is it time to debate and abolish the death penalty?
 
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i am not sure whether you want to touch on this here but there is another component to wrongful convictions. the kind that does not end up at the gallows.

what of the innocent that are merely incarcerated? how do we speak for them?

But the quirks in the death penalty process are, if anything, less pronounced than the quirks in the criminal justice system generally. The true error rate for the criminal justice system as a whole may be much higher than the twelve percent national error rate in death penalty cases. DNA analysis is only available where a DNA specimen exists, such as in rape cases or bloody murder cases. For the vast majority of innocent criminal defendants, there is no hope of exoneration through DNA analysis.
Even if the true error rate of America’s criminal justice system is only ten percent, this translates to 200,000 innocent people presently behind bars in the United States. It means that there are more innocent prisoners in America than there are prisoners of all kinds in France, Germany and Britain combined. It means that the present number of innocent American prisoners is actually higher than the entire American prison population back in 1970.

Moreover, even the guilty are often wrongfully convicted. Too many convictions are owed more to the zeal of the justice system than to appropriate evidence. Improperly obtained evidence, coerced or inaccurately taken confessions, and exaggerated testimony have become common elements in the criminal courts. It is the totally “clean” prosecution, rather than, as Learned Hand suggested, the totally innocent person convicted, that is too often the anomaly in the criminal justice system (roger roots)​
is that actually the case?
 
While you make very valid points, I think that the gravity of capital punishment is a indicator of a completely broken judicial system. It's one that says that not one of these people could ever be rehabilitated. Period. The great majority of death row inmates have no access to mental health, are completely isolated for 23 hours a day and have nearly no access to the outside. That's not the case in most other convictions.

There are many people who were wrongfully convicted and are serving time at present, and I think the error rate of 10% is generous and is probably much higher than that. It is my hope that science will continue to free innocent people, and that we will become more astute in the way we convict people in general. As we learn more, we will err less. But death. Death is final. There is no turning that back.

Adding to the problem is a lack of sufficient review process for appeals for these people. They are often denied the hearing, without reports and evidence presented ever being read or reviewed at all. This is human life we are talking about, and while murderers are vile people, they have equal weight to the people they may or may not have killed. But we consider them nothing as soon as the accusations fly. We zero them out as human beings.

If you read the story by Mr. Grann in the New Yorker, there is a piece about how witness testimony changes over time when even the slighest theory is applied to the events they saw. That also should be understood because it is easy to change the mind quickly into really believing that the notions presented and it becoming the selective truth of the witness themself. In cases like Kevin Fox, police tampering and false faith in polygraphs are a huge factor on whether or not someone is convicted of a crime they didn't commit. Jurors almost always place a great weight on the words of a police officer who may or may not have their own perceptions and intentions.

I would wager a guess that 50% of the prisoners in the system today, were convicted on some sort of scientifically or ethically bunk premise.

I don't think it's that high in death penalty cases, but I do think that we have executed more than one innocent man. It's just the only one we've scientifically proven at this point.
 
gustav said:
is that actually the case?
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My suspicion is that in lesser crimes a smaller percentage of the truly innocent are convicted - the kinds of pressures and circumstances that bias toward conviction at any cost are missing.
 
In many countries the death penalty was abolished for one reason : not to execute an innocent person . Wrong witnesses and evidence tampering are two huge problems in the legal system .
 
Gustav said:
pardon the rhetoric................life at what price?
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Well right. I agree.

But again, death is final. And the topic was about the death penalty in particular. I'd love to talk about wrongfully convicted people and how awful the system really is, but I'd rather do that in another thread. Not trying to seem insensitive, as they are equally important to me, but Mr. Grann's article made me want to specifically talk about the fact that Texas killed an innocent man.
 
mike47 said:
In many countries the death penalty was abolished for one reason : not to execute an innocent person . Wrong witnesses and evidence tampering are two huge problems in the legal system .
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Mike, do you think that the death penalty is ever warranted? Or will we always make mistakes with the possibility of putting a man/woman to death erroneously?

I don't think we can ever, not with strict ethics, extensive reviews and solid scientific evidence say that there wouldn't be the chance of putting an innocent person to death.
 
iceaura said:
My suspicion is that in lesser crimes a smaller percentage of the truly innocent are convicted - the kinds of pressures and circumstances that bias toward conviction at any cost are missing.
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it does not have to be a suspicion. it is merely logical. the more restrictive the circumstance, the lesser room to err, etc

consider the issuance of a traffic ticket. the process is practically automated now
 
Gustav not nessarly, in NSW 50% of those who challanged a speeding or parking fine were found to be correct and the ticket in error. Partually that is due to things like signs being obscured, medical emergencies ect but its still a fact
 
sure
technicalities and loopholes to game the system
kinda like....""How to Beat a Speeding Ticket and What the Courts Don't want you to know""

nonetheless it does not distract from the larger point
 
err no, we arnt talking about technicalities. Having no sign or a tree in front of the sign so you cant see it is a valid excuse. As is the case where the women was over the other side of the road doing CPR on her mother when the idot inspector gave her a ticket
 
what i just said was in no way, a refutation of yours
no sign = technicality = valid excuse
savvy?

theoretically the system can be foolproof with very little effort leaving no room to maneuver around it. practically what we see is incompetence in planning and perhaps a lack of funds
 
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