NYT: “[A] recently completed study of the 124 exonerations of death row inmates in America from 1973 to 2007 indicated that 80, or about two-thirds, of their so-called wrongful convictions resulted not from good-faith mistakes or errors but from intentional, willful, malicious prosecutions by criminal justice personnel.”
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In the movie “The Thin Blue Line” — about how the Dallas police manufactured a capital conviction and death sentence against an innocent man — a prosecutor is quoted as saying, “Anyone can convict someone who is guilty. It takes a good prosecutor to convict someone who is innocent.”
Thanks for linking that article. Two things come immediately to mind: 1) Any officer of the court caught perpetrating a fraud on the court should face disbarment at least, and probably criminal charges; 2) Athough I read most “studies” with a certain amount of skepticism (they’re too often proven wrong by the next study)… this one has me re-thinking my support of CP. It definitely is worth looking into.
This sort of thing really is the number one reason I’m against capital punishment. I believe that for some people to be killed is just and would be good for society, but I don’t trust anyone or any system to carry out capital punishment fairly, and I think our system in the US is a good example of how with the best of intentions, such a system just has too high of a failure rate.
As far as an officer of the court caught perpetrating a fraud, if it’s in a case where capital punishment is on the table, I count that as attempted murder or attempted manslaughter, myself. It doesn’t much matter whether the murder weapon is the criminal justice system or a gun.
Even without corruption, I can’t support capital punishment: Our system has flaws, and death is final.
It’s certainly not the number one reason I don’t support capital punishment, but the flawed system is the reason on which I can establish common ground in opposition to it with most people.
It’s shocking, though, how many people claim to not trust the government with education, business regulation, or any number of things, yet seem completely comfortable trusting it with deciding to kill someone.
And lately, MB, a lot of those people are fine with trusting the government with listening in on all our communications, torturing people, and spiriting people off to secret prisons without charge or oversight as well.
Oh brother.
Oh brother what? Tell me that people who go on about the incompetence of gov’t in some areas (as ID’d above) don’t express near-absolute confidence in it in others.
The problem with your premise, MB, is that you’ve set up a situation whereby people must believe either that government is terrific at everything, or it’s terrible at everything, and there is no middle ground.
In fact, virtually everyone (you and myself included) believes that there are some things government is especially good at, and some things government should just leave alone. We simply disagree about what those things are.
I’ve not set up any such thing. And in any event, you’ve got the disagreement wrong. We have differing views of where we find the possibility of failure acceptable.
OK, I’ll clarify exactly *how* you set that up.
“Tell me that people who go on about the incompetence of gov’t in some areas (as ID’d above) don’t express near-absolute confidence in it in others.”
Of course people do that. There are some things that the gov’t does very well, and others that it does miserably and should keep the heck out of. So why is it wrong for someone to “go on about the incompetence of gov’t” in the areas it does poorly, and then “express near confidence in it” in the areas that it does very well? Since you appear to be criticizing people who have such a divided opinion of gov’t, the only alternative is to believe that it sucks at everything or it’s fabulous at everything.
And if you’re referring to accepting the possibility of failure re: capital punishment you need to go back and read my first post again.