USA USA UPDATE
Alabama man released after decades on death row: Sign of a flawed system? (+video)
As the number of death-row exonerees continues to grow, fundamental questions are being raised about potential flaws in the system.
By Cristina Maza, Staff writer APRIL 3, 2015
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Hinton is the third death-row inmate freed in the United States in less than a month. Since 1973, 151 people besides Hinton have been released from death row. And as the number of exonerees continues to grow, fundamental questions are being raised about potential flaws in the system.
“The fact that there’s innocent people in prison or death row has transformed people’s understanding of the death penalty,” University of North Carolina political scientist Frank Baumgartner, author of “The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence,” told Monitor reporter Patrik Jonsson.
“Your opinion about the death penalty in the abstract is one thing, but meeting exonerees changes the death penalty from an abstract principle to a very practical issue of: Can the government do it right every single time?
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And, we don’t know exactly the extent of the “error rate”.
Now isn’t the saying better that 100 guilty go free than 1 innocent goes to jail?
No erasers on the “pencils” of the death penalty!
Given that a trial costs 4 times the cost of life in prison (read that somewhere; good enough for a swag!) seems like we should just eliminate it for the most part. (Maybe it’s retained for those felons convicted of killing a correction officer?)
Sorry, but being pro-life means being anti-death penalty.
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Reinke Faces Life 