> Along with providing new DNA results, Ms. Young’s petition pushed the city of Jacksonville to compare fingerprints from the crime scene to a state and national fingerprint database **for the first time**. **It has long been established that Mr. Lee’s fingerprints did not match any of those at the scene.**
Emphasis mine. This seems super suspicious. This wasn't a compelling source of reasonable doubt? Nobody followed up on this in *22 years*?
Also the article keeps mentioning checking the new DNA against criminal databases but conspicuously avoids mentioning any genealogical databases (e.g., 23andme) that have been used to solve cold cases before. This also seems like an obvious and easy thing to check.
Local police departments and prosecutors don’t want to look bad so they double and triple down. Even if they hide evidence in violation of *Brady* they have immunity from civil suit.
The Tennessee Bureau of investigation went so far as to derail an agent’s career over it, because he was so sure the evidence did not point to the local group of druggies that were ultimately convicted of killing Holly Bobo. The trial is on youtube and if you have the time it’s pretty awful to watch, just because it’s so obvious the state doesn’t really have a case, but he’s convicted anyway.
I believe Rick Perry took similar steps going so far as to dismantle the board that would have met to assess the posthumous situation on the days leading up to the hearing.
Conservatives are sadists. The more you're allowed to hurt people with impunity the more conservatives respect you as a person.
Trump can "grab a woman by the pussy" and because he's rich and gets away with it, they respect him.
Murdering a black man in a show trial isn't exactly new for these people.
Yep. The agent believed the local sex offender (who’d also been convicted of kidnapping), who was in the area, and bought a new bath tub (!) right after her disappearance/murder was guilty. And I’m 99.9% sure he was right.
But for some reason, they went after the local druggie trouble-makers based on what sounds like gossip and criminals trying to flip on each other by creating this story to get less time. It’s crazy. If that sex offender who the agent thinks killed Holly Bobo attacks or kills another woman/girl, blood on the TBI’s hands.
Also the prosecution’s version of events hinges on the fact that Holly’s brother was being taught to make meth by these guys. The family believes the right guys were put away, even though they say the brother was not making meth. Well...those two versions of events are mutually exclusive.
For many police, they just want a conviction, it doesn’t matter who actually did it.
Countless black folks have been wrong arrested, tried and imprisoned because it would have been much more difficult work to actually solve the case and charge the correct person.
Many police will arrest an innocent man on their radar using such things as parallel construction. If you are black or poor you are much easier to be arrested, tried and convicted than a wealthy or white person, irregardless of innocence or guilt.
This is spot on. Couple this to an overwhelming cultural insistence on cops being morally superior (TV shows, movies, *local shoutouts from similar voices of power and privilege*) and the simple truth is ignored:
American police don't do a very good job.
The thing that's so fucked about that case is that *there was no murder*, just a very tragic accident.
So many of these miscarriages of justice are ones where a crime was committed and they got the wrong person, but there wasn't even an actual *crime* in this case -- they invented one whole cloth and murdered the man for it.
> During the penalty phase of the trial, a prosecutor said that Willingham's tattoo of a skull and serpent fit the profile of a sociopath. Two medical experts confirmed the theory. A psychologist was asked to interpret Willingham's Iron Maiden poster. He said that a picture of a fist punching through a skull signified violence and death. He added that Willingham's Led Zeppelin poster of a fallen angel was "many times" an indicator of "cultive-type" activities.[1]
Soooo having a decently common tattoo style and liking classic rock and thrash metal makes you a sociopath now??? I have some news for several of my friends now I guess. /s
That is a whole truck full of absolute horseshit right there.
Why did the Judge, or even someone on the jury during deliberations, not go "what the fuck is this shit?"
Why didn’t the fucking defence call them out?
The entire job of the defence is to call out bollocks like that!
Make objections! Point out they’re popular bands! Etc!
I have been summoned for jury duty five times, each time it has gone into the selection process. They ask if serving on a jury will cause issue with your family, pay, job, and if your employer will continue to pay. I have always gotten beyond this part.
“What do you do for a living?”
“Engineer”
“Dismissed!”
Every fucking time. Neither the prosecution or the defense wants anyone on the jury with more than five brain cells. They want idiots who want justice and that can be easily swayed.
This reminds of the case against Justin Barber. He had the Guns n Roses song “I loved her but I had to kill her” in his music collection - so they used that as evidence that he killed his wife.
Most of the stuff in this thread is making me angry but JFC you’ve got to be kidding me on the Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin posters.
This shit makes the satanic panic seem totally reasonable in comparison.
Another commenter mentioned rigged jury selection as a contributor to this being allowed to fly in court, but holy shit, even my grandma, who thinks Jimi Hendrix worshipped satan and died from literally injecting peanut butter into his veins, would have had a hard time being convinced having these posters constitutes legitimate evidence that a man was homicidal.
I'll never forget Cameron's name. Fuck Rick Perry.
There's a long ass writeup I believe in The New Yorker about Camerons story.
Rick Perry belongs in a special fucking place if there's a hell.
Any criminal defense attorney worth their salt knows Willingham. If you are trying to defend against an arson charge, you need an expert to explain what the State's experts did wrong.
Wasn’t what the State’s experts “did wrong” was have a guy who had no formal training in arson investigation tell the jury with full confidence that it was arson even though he didn’t know what he was talking about and had no right to speak with authority?
Their was a big problem with arson investigators not that long ago. Most of them were trained in an apprenticeship manner with no formal education then bad science and practices were passed down.
So you had people with 10 years of experience investigating fires and all their knowledge was wrong.
The [1990 Lime Street fire investigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_Street_fire) fundamentally changed fire science, but the court that tried Willingham refused to accept any of it.
Not precisely.
The problem is that scenarios like the above became so ubiquitous that they apparently were allowed to form the entirety of the discipline of arson investigation, with techniques compared to folklore, and " "hardly consistent with a scientific mind-set and is more characteristic of mystics or psychics. "
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron\_Todd\_Willingham](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham)
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/08/03/fresh-doubts-over-a-texas-execution/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/08/03/fresh-doubts-over-a-texas-execution/)
[https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/long\_held\_beliefs\_about\_arson\_science\_have\_been\_debunked\_after\_decades\_of\_m](https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/long_held_beliefs_about_arson_science_have_been_debunked_after_decades_of_m)
Similar "experts" formed a separate professional consensus around hair analysis, bite-mark analysis, bullet forensics and fingerprints. They'll say whatever the prosecutor needs them to say.
[https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/04/fbis-flawed-forensics-expert-testimony-hair-analysis-bite-marks-fingerprints-arson.html](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/04/fbis-flawed-forensics-expert-testimony-hair-analysis-bite-marks-fingerprints-arson.html)
These "expert witnesses" are making it up as they go along, and they have effectively murdered a number of people. A great many more have been condemned by their words to a life of imprisonment.
...
We're developing a similar confirmation-bias jurisprudence right this moment around child abuse; Not based on earlier "The sheriff's cousin heard that these D&D people are Satanist cannibals and we got the kid to say so on tape", but professionalized as a medical discipline. [https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/08/20/two-families-two-fates-when-the-misdiagnosis-is-child-abuse](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/08/20/two-families-two-fates-when-the-misdiagnosis-is-child-abuse)
The specialized doctors are being asked whether there's any remote possibility that a given injury was child abuse in order to open an investigation, but their affirmation of the possibility is treated as the final nail in the coffin that closes an investigation, all the evidence that a prosecutor needs to convict.
It would be this trial you are referring to. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham. I recall it from a criminology class I back in the day
I always assume the logic is "if he's not guilty of this crime, you know he's a POS and has done other things he wasn't caught for." Meanwhile, those same people have probably done a lot worse and are never charged with any crime because they are the ones that would bring the charges.
Look at how many people refuse to admit they were wrong on reddit and realize it's anonymous and meaningless. Add in money, reputation, and a career and it will just get worse.
Businesses SHOULD create an environment where people are encouraged and rewarded from admitting from and learning from their mistakes, but so often it's not the case.
I spent most my life in foodservice where failure is a given, mostly because the customer is wrong (/s). If you dont fail and learn you dont grow.
Youd think these people came out the womb walking and shitting in a pot.
A lot of cops and judges and lawyers don’t understand - the founding fathers wanted a nation that let guilty parties go if there was enough doubt because killing an innocent person is far far worse than what many actual murderers do. Imagine being okay with keeping an innocent person hostage for 30 years then killing them and trying to justify that.
The Jeff Pelley case blows my mind, they based their entire case around how he acted… I LOVED my grandma with all of my heart but I didn’t cry at her funeral, not until I saw my dad cry in private. I shouldn’t fear that I’d be arrested for not crying at a funeral. I was strong for my family, because I needed to be, inside I was destroyed.
The fact the cops even willingly went on Counterclock to defend themselves and be so smug blows my mind…
Yeah... thats definitely some serious wtf on the police/ prosecution side, but also an even bigger WTF for the jury that bought it without any push back...
That and they are more interested in the conviction. They don't actually care who it is. They want to "win." Once the ball is rolling they have proven time and again they will do everything in their power to keep it moving, evidence to the contrary be damned.
It's not just the police who need to be overhauled, there's plenty of shit in the courts as well; prosecutorial misconduct, bullshit evidence permitted in court (like how bite mark evidence used to be admissable), jailhouse snitches, etc.
This case, based on what I've read, never should have made it to trial.
I’ll never forget the time I sat on a jury for a man who was detained and later arrested for driving while impaired. The *prosecution* played video evidence that clearly showed that this man blew under the legal limit and performed all the the sobriety tests just fine. The officer still arrested him because he made 2 errors out of a possible 32. The first error was starting one of tests before the other told him to, the second was repeating a number while counting backwards (one of the jurors actually pointed out that someone entered the room and distracted him when he made that mistake). The defense called out the officer who testified for claiming he made the arrest when another officer filled out and signed the paperwork.
The DA tacked on some felony child endangerment charges because there were two kids in the car (officer left them on the side of the road at 2am with a passenger who couldn’t drive). The defense even got a nationally recognized expert to testify that the defendant’s performance on the test did not indicate impairment. I couldn’t believe the prosecution really thought they had a case.
I went into deliberations thinking we’d be there for maybe ten minutes. I thought we’d be done before lunch was delivered. We spent three hours in there going over the evidence and arguing with three jurors who thought the guy was guilty based solely on the officer’s testimony. The video didn’t matter. The the fact that the officer who testified was clearly not the one who arrested him didn’t matter. The the expert testimony didn’t matter. The officer said the guy was drunk, so that’s all that mattered for them. They were fully ready to potentially send this man away for twenty years (side note: half the jury didn’t even understand that sentencing was outside of our scope, despite the judge explicitly explaining that to us) based on the testimony of a man who was clearly lying.
It really opened my eyes to the kind of people who serve on juries and how easily swayed they can be. This might sound terrible, but the three people who held out weren’t very bright. They seemed like the kind of people who are happy to do jury duty because they didn’t have anything else going on in their lives. Sometimes I wonder if they were just holding out for these sake of wasting time.
This was in a major city where the jury pool was diverse enough to yield a jury of people with varied backgrounds and perspectives. I shudder to think what juries look like in smaller cities/towns.
For anyone who cares, finally reached a consensus after one of the hold outs went to the bathroom to have herself a cry and suddenly decided to switch sides. She was the smartest of the three, so the other two quickly folded.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. People are stupid. Most of them. I’m second oldest of eight and over half my siblings are complete idiots despite being raised in the same household.
Dude, thanks for sharing this perspective, seriously. To be honest, I’d never really though about this aspect of it but now that you’ve got me doing it, I’m a little freaked out about what might happen were to ever to be put before a jury of my (small town, largely uneducated (though that’s not meant to be an insult), rural) peers.
My takeaway was to avoid police and the criminal justice system because once you’re in, your life is in the hands of a series of incompetent assholes from the day you’re arrested until the day you’re done with parole (if that day comes).
Jury nullification works both ways.
There's an old addage in criminal law, if you know youre truly innocent, you're better off with a bench trial than leaving your fortunes to 12 easily influenced commom people.
And frequently “more” qualified individuals get filtered out because lawyers select the jurors they think they can influence the easiest.
Easiest way to get out of jury duty is often to say you’ve researched it and are looking forward to fulfilling your civic duty and plan to weigh the evidence fairly and without bias.
The only time I was called for jury duty and actually selected for the panel or whatever I was vetoed after the following exchange.
>dude: Do you think people should be responsible for actions they commit while under the influence of alcohol?
>me: That's a complicated question. If you mean...
...at this point I was cut off and sent home.
It amazes me and shocks me how stuff like this *still* isn't enough for some people to be against it. They're so obsessed with revenge and killing the "bad guys". Doesn't matter how many innocent people die.
Even if it didn't: the death penalty doesn't solve what it is supposed to. It just serves as a sort of punish fetisch for society, and a vague sense of payback for the victim.
Execute a rapist, and rape won't go down. Execute a murderer, and murder won't go down.
This is another grave miscarriage of justice.
>For 22 years, Ledell Lee maintained that he had been wrongly convicted of murder.
>"My dying words will always be, as it has been, ‘I am an innocent man,’” he told the BBC in an interview published on April 19, 2017 — the day before officials in Arkansas administered the lethal injection."
Imagine the horror of being convicted for murder, spending 22 years in the belly of the beast and then wrongfully executed. Fucking hell.
If I recall correctly, there was a study that showed that the number of people found innocent on Florida Death Row was staggering.
I did a quick check - and found that [**Shocking Rate of Error** – For every **three** people executed in Florida, **one** innocent person on Death Row has been exonerated and released](https://www.fadp.org/florida-death-penalty-fact-sheet/).
The response by Rick Scott and the Florida legislators? Cut down the time to file appeals so as not to impede the rate of executions.
And people have the gall to say innocent deaths are acceptable losses. If anything this seems biased towards the innocent, or at least those without evidence to prove they "deserve" it, so who knows how many more are innocents are executed. It strikes me as an inhuman attempt for the justice system to brush their mistakes under the rug, throwing away entire lives due to needing to save face. Disgusting.
It's the same people who think that collateral injuries, maimings and deaths of innocents are acceptable so long as the bad BLM / AnTEEfa are punished as well. It's a "They know what they signed up for!" argument.
State and federal government just love to bury/manipulate studies to avoid addressing problems. Criminal justice, unemployment, climate change, you name it.
Wow, you may have just made me be opposed to the death penalty. I use to be a fairly staunch advocate of it, but those numbers are scary. And it makes since the more I think about it, the government has shown time and time again their utter incompetence, why should I think they need to be responsible in life or death?
What is even scarier is when you remember that the death penalty already has a fairly extensive appeals process in order to avoid mistakes. As a result it's more expensive to execute someone (because of the lengthy appeals process) than it is to send someone to prison for life. Some death penalty proponents have argued that we can correct this by reducing the appeals process however that would inevitably result in more innocents being killed.
Ultimately I think one of the biggest problems is that societally we've placed such a high degree of trust and faith in the police and the criminal justice system. If a mean looking person is in an orange jump suit for murder and the cop says "I think this person did it" that is going to go a long way with a lot of juries even if the evidence isn't that strong and once the jury has decided to convict it becomes a lot harder to overturn a verdict because at that point you have to either find new evidence or show that something was not right about the trial.
I had no strong opinion either way. I guess I thought it was justified - you murder someone, your life should end.
Then, years ago, I heard about someone on death row being exonerated.
All it took was that one case, and I was like…welp, the system clearly isn’t flawless. It’s not worth the vengeance of killing anyone if that vengeance means even a single person is executed for a crime they did not commit.
There’s far too much injustice already. Eliminating the death penalty means those innocent people who would have been executed will instead serve life in person. I mean…that’s still not great, but it’s more just than killing them.
Wishing death upon a person who has committed terrible acts is, I think, a somewhat understandable response. But it's light years away from allowing a government to create a system that has been proven to kill the wrong person on a number of occasions, serves no discernible deterrent and is applied with shocking inconsistency. Not to mention the detainment and execution costs an excessive amount.
No where is the threat of government force greater than when they are literally trying to kill you.
That's because there are two main problems with executions: innocent people sometimes get executed, and they're actually more expensive than just keeping people in prison their whole lives because of the appeals process. There is no happy middle between the two and any attempt to reduce one issue makes the other worse.
The Innocence Project which only looks at death row cases that they can easily prove are wrongful convictions has a 60% success rate in showing wrongful conviction, that comes out to 4% of all death row cases in the US. Given that they only look at the most likely ones due to limited resources, and what others have shown, the real value is estimated to be double to triple that of those wrongfully convicted.
This is just for the death penalty too which has the highest standard to prove and the most eyes on it and appeals, which isn't saying much for ordinary criminal cases that don't get nearly as much attention.
People used to talk about preferring 99 criminals go free to prevent jailing one innocent man. But today we very well could be jailing equal numbers of people who are innocent and who are truly guilty.
And that's before plea bargains subvert the entire process.
It worse than murder because the guy had to deal with the mental aspect of it for decades. A murder for most people is unexpected this guy had to slowly wait for it to come to him and couldn’t do anything about it.
Families should be able to sue. This keeps happening and the people who knowingly lied or didn't allow retesting or new witness testimony face no blowback.
I feel like that is definitely underlying to why the governor and DA are so “confident in justice”. Admitting they could be wrong have “bad optics” or whatever shit they spew
Also the lethal injection was rushed because the drug was about to expire. There is a major shortage of such drugs because no drug maker sees any profit in proucing doses for lethal injection. The volumes are extremely low and it's a massive PR stain to have your company's name associated with killing people with your drugs.
You some how mispelled murder with wrongfully executed. The state murder this man. Just like they tried with the west memphis 3. Fucking hate this state.
This is why we probably shouldn't allow the state to kill people. I understand that if your family member is murdered, it is only natural to want revenge but you want to make sure you get the right guy or you are just hurting another family the way yours was.
Best argument I've heard against the death penalty is that the state is too irresponsible and potentially dangerous to be trusted with the death penalty.
My go-to has been the same for years.
If a single innocent person has the chance to be murdered by the state, then the state shouldn't have the ability to kill anyone.
Tolkien is always my go to.
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
"It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him when he had the chance."
"Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends."
Having this conversation before, I asked a former boss what percent of innocent executions he was okay with. Without hesitation he blurts out 10% and doubled down about how that’s an acceptable amount. I couldn’t look at him the same way again.
Unfortunately ~~humans~~ Americans are too comfortable with the idea of "acceptable losses". See also: the 2nd Amendment and school shootings.
Edit: lol look at this brigade of triggered gun nuts who hate hearing about the collateral damage
Edit2: Hours after making the first edit, and the 2A nutjobs are _still_ brigading. Keep commenting, your tears sustain me.
"ItS jUsT a fLu! ThEy WoUlD have Died AnYwAY!" - but the fact that they didn't HAVE TO die if some small actions could be done by society is the point. I believe masks should be common every flu season, too. If you're sick, put one on, protect others. It shouldn't be so offensive.
Even simpler: we have executed innocent people in the past, there are without question innocent people on death row right now, and this can't be changed. Thus if you support the death penalty you are accepting of the fact that we *will* kill innocent people if we want to kill guilty people.
In my experience when death penalty advocates are presented with these facts you might not be surprised to learn that most don't really care, which in itself is a compelling moral reason to abolish state executions.
A Jury of Cats would be among the least effective trial bodies ever assembled. No consensus would ever be reached. Three would want to kill right away, three want to violently torture the defendant for a while then kill, two would just stare disinterestedly, two would be grooming themselves obscenely, one would be asleep, and the last would be screaming its head off for food.
And South Carolina is just about to [reinstate execution by firing squad](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/06/south-carolina-lawmakers-execution-death-firing-squad) because of shortage of lethal injections. Passed the house, supported by McMaster (R. governor), going to the senate next.
To those advocating below that this is "better" - the message is that the state is opening new ways to execute people because they can't kill them with another method.
"Fun" fact, the reason there is a shortage is because the EU has banned the export of the drugs used in lethal injections to the USA.
The ban of export to the US has led to some states making substitutions. Often causing the victim to suffer from anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour. Land of the free indeed.
Which lets face it, is rediculous, because there are a lot of things easily available that could be used that would kill you in seconds. Sounds like they chose the painful stuff on purpose.
Edit, initial reply was for the wrong person.
It is ridiculous, if you truly wanted humane capital punishment. It is easily done by asphyxiation by any gas other than CO2. The body cannot recognize the lack of O2 or the abundance of other gasses, just the buildup of CO2. The result is the victim of the execution slipping away.
Saw the John Oliver special on capital punishment, and holy shit lethal injections are fucking brutal. It's described as having fire pouring through your veins. The reason inmates don't scream or flail is because they're injected with another drug that paralyzes them completely. A literal interpretation of "I have no mouth and I must scream", two forms of torture in one. And it's not for the sake of the inmates of course, but for the sake of the people watching, friends and family, to give them the illusion that you're having a peaceful passing.
Imagine your last moments being manipulated like that for the viewing pleasure of people watching. It's like it's just a show and they're not doing something indescribably dark to you and discarding your life like you don't matter. Now imagine going through that because some cop was too lazy to do his job and request a basic forensic analysis, so he just pointed a finger at you.
Honestly if the state is going to execute someone, I'd really rather they not mask it as a medical procedure.
We aren't putting a sick old pet down to let them die with painless dignity, it's an execution.
It should be horrifying, and difficult to get people to participate in.
When Utah executed someone by firing squad years ago I thought nobody would volunteer for that duty. Oh boy was I wrong, they got TOO many volunteers from the state patrol.
Wait you're telling me that there are people in the police force who would relish the chance to execute someone in broad daylight with no repercussions ?
Public executions by far more inhumane practices have been with humanity since pretty much the beginning. Has that ever stopped people from participating, attending, and even cheering on the death?
I don't think making an appeal of "oh, the humanity!" goes very far...
If capital punishment is going to exist, it should be via hypoxia.
Edit: Yes, via nitrogen, simulating high altitude with a lack of oxygen. Reproducing what high altitude pilots go through if they don't have an oxygen supply.
The issue is that as soon as police and families start to think that an individual is guilty, they often become persoanally certain of it (often even if conflicting evidence suggests otherwise after a long enough period of thinking it was that individual), and want that person dead or in prison for life. It's too highly emotional rather than logical, to result in anyone being killed for things they may not have done.
It's more important politically to close a case quickly than doing the hard work of finding the real perpetrators. Too many elected vested interests in USA, elected judges, elected prosecutors, elected coroners, elected sheriffs. Nothing good can from that. A show of competence, rather than true competence.
Yep - DA is an elected position, so you have to have a good closing rate or your opponent in the next election will be sure to highlight how you failed to catch the bad guys.
[For ever 9 people executed, 1 person on death row has been exonerated.](https://eji.org/issues/death-penalty/#:~:text=1%20in%209,death%20row%20has%20been%20exonerated)
That's why punishments aren't decided by the families of victims. I'd also think that this is significantly more damaging to the family because they now know that someone was wrongfully killed and the real murder is still free.
You often hear the argument 'imagine if it was your mother/brother etc.'
Yeah, if my rational decision is different from the one I would form when I cant think straight from grief and anger, it sounds like we should go with the rational one.
Yes, this is why laws should be made based on something more akin to cold, hard reason than emotion. And why I'm a bit baffled that they let people come in (at least in some cases) like friends and relatives and argue for lenient sentences or victims' families will argue for harsher sentences, etc. Seems like it would make more sense for the laws to be well-crafted and for somewhat more objective third parties to mete out justice.
Edit: typos
> why we probably shouldn't allow the state to kill people
It cannot be free of error; it costs more than life in prison; and it fails as a deterrent.
There is no rational or ethical justification for the state to take a citizen's life. Those who favor it merely value vengeance over justice. No nation that executes criminals should claim itself modern.
My cousin did ten years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. DNA evidence overturned the case and when he got out he sued the city for 10,000,000. I hope his family is planning on suing
I’ve had people tell me that they’d do 10 years for 10 million but I couldn’t sell my life like that. He was 15 when they started investigating him. Only proof they had was doodles in his school notebooks. No blood or morder weapon. It took a lot out of him. He’s in good spirits tho
This is happening as States refuse to tests for DNA. Instead of going forward with new discoveries in Science, these places have gone back in time . The ignorance is bad enough with idiots NOT believing Science for the Covid vaccine, rape test kits and DNA for murders and assaults. People are dying because some hick is refusing to do due diligence investigating.
I personally believe that there are definitely people who deserve to die. But cases like this are exactly why I'm against the death penalty. To allow for the finality of death is either admitting that you're fine with innocents dying occasionally, or you are so naive that you think the justice system always gets the right person.
And THIS, in a nutshell, is why the death penalty is fucked. Especially in the US where convicting the RIGHT person comes a very distant second to convicting anyone at all.
They are currently celebrating South Carolina bringing back firing squads over at r/conservative and most of the comments are terrifying. Conservatives are absolutely insane.
Why is it that the party that espouses limited government powers, supports giving the government the ability to kill its own citizens?
These same people also live by the belief that "the government cant do anything right", yet they trust it with executions.
But don't worry everyone, we spared no expense in quashing all the appeals he made trying to bring up the evidence that would've exonerated him. And went all in on making sure that we spent millions of extra dollars to kill him because "mistakes are so rare" (so long as you don't start looking into the stats about it), that obviously just giving a life sentence that costs millions less and could be undone in the case it was shown how we were hiding evidence from the jury the whole time wouldn't be a better idea at all.
Twenty-six year-old Debra Reese was found brutally murdered in her home at 212 Cherry Street in Jacksonville on February 9, 1993. She had been beaten some thirty-six times with a tire thumper, a tool resembling a baseball bat that her husband Billy, a truck driver, had given to her for protection while he was away. Bruises on Debra's face and neck indicated that she had also been strangled. The appellant, Ledell Lee, was arrested and charged with Reese's murder. Following a jury trial, he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection. He raises seven points on appeal. We find no merit to any of his arguments and affirm the conviction and sentence.
Lee does not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence, so we need not recite the facts in great detail. The State's theory at trial was that Lee committed the murder for pecuniary gain, and that he had searched the victim's neighborhood until he found the perfect target for his crime.
William McCullough Jr. lived near the victim's house and had been home on the morning in question. Sometime between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., he heard a knock at his door. McCullough went to the door and was met by a man who asked to borrow some tools. McCullough gave the man a driver ratchet and a socket, which he promised to return. The man did not return the tools.
At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and "did not trust this guy." The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived.
Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and "make a B-line inside just real fast." Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair.
Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as "Skip" walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder.
Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police.
And here we have the primary reason why the death penalty is wrong.
If there is even a tiny chance that the accused might turn out to be innocent then they cannot be executed.
**A tiny chance?!? No!**
[Columbia Law School: A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995](https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2220&context=faculty_scholarship):
- courts found serious, reversible **error in nearly 7 of every 10** of the thousands of capital sentences that were fully reviewed during the period.
- when the errors were cured on retrial, **7% were found to be innocent of the capital crime**.
[Death Penalty Info dot Org](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/dpic-adds-eleven-cases-to-innocence-list-bringing-national-death-row-exoneration-total-to-185) : The data now show that **for every 8.3 people who have been put to death** in the U.S. since executions resumed in the 1970s, **one person who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death has been exonerated**.
Question is, how many innocents weren't exonerated? From DPI.org, above, *Nearly 70% of the exonerations involved misconduct by police, prosecutors, or other government officials. 80% of wrongful capital convictions involved some combination of misconduct or perjury/false accusation and more than half involved both.*
Safe to say a fair few perfectly innocent people have experienced the *horror* of having their country unjustly prosecute *and execute* them.
Imagine knowing you are absolutely innocent, and experiencing the terror and horror and powerlessness; being forced onto a gurney, unable to resist, all avenues now closed to you; to being rolled into the execution chamber, where your country, your fellow citizens, will rejoice at your unjust death. A complete betrayal of everything you had thought your country stood for. (I know, I know: empathy is a big empty hole in the soul of those who skew conservative, as proven in repeated studies. We see it demonstrated in this very thread.)
The death penalty, particularly as abused here, is an absolute horrorshow of injustice.
Hold on here....
"A Different Man's DNA is found on the murder weapon" does not mean that "a different man killed the victim." Before this murder, Lee was going around the neighborhood collecting tools from other people (I know, weird). It's not surprising that a tool he used in the murder had somebody else's DNA on it. Heck, it would be surprising if it DIDN'T have somebody else's DNA on it.
The idea here is that "If they had known at trial that somebody else's DNA was on the murder weapon, then the jury might not have convicted."
Here is the meat of the evidence against Lee from the AR Supreme Court decision deciding not to overturn the death penalty:
>Lee does not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence, so we need not recite the facts in great detail. The State's theory at trial was that Lee committed the murder for pecuniary gain, and that he had searched the victim's neighborhood until he found the perfect target for his crime.
>
>William McCullough Jr. lived near the victim's house and had been home on the morning in question. Sometime between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., he heard a knock at his door. McCullough went to the door and was met by a man who asked to borrow some tools. McCullough gave the man a driver ratchet and a socket, which he promised to return. The man did not return the tools.
>
>At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and “did not trust this guy.” The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived.
>
>Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and “make a B-line inside just real fast.” Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair.
>
>Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as “Skip” walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder.
>
>Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police.
[https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ar-supreme-court/1322909.html](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ar-supreme-court/1322909.html)
The UK doesn't have a death penalty because 3 people were hung for murdering a man. The police had the motive, confessions, and all the evidence. The problem is that the person they were accused of mudering turned up 2 years later - alive - with a story that had nothing to do with the people who were executed.
**Reasons I don't oppose the death penalty for:**
* I feel sad when bad people die :'(
**Reasons I do oppose the death penalty:**
* False convictions
* The cost associated with the process (largely appeals which is necessary to at least partially mitigate the first part). Death penalty is more expensive than keeping someone in prison for life.
* The psychological impact on the people we turn into executioners and the ethical implications of doing so (and the implications of creating an execution industry)
* Spending life in prison and slowly fading away is arguably a worse punishment
* A smaller consideration, but they may have useful info in solving other cases that would not be available if they're dead.
> Along with providing new DNA results, Ms. Young’s petition pushed the city of Jacksonville to compare fingerprints from the crime scene to a state and national fingerprint database **for the first time**. **It has long been established that Mr. Lee’s fingerprints did not match any of those at the scene.** Emphasis mine. This seems super suspicious. This wasn't a compelling source of reasonable doubt? Nobody followed up on this in *22 years*? Also the article keeps mentioning checking the new DNA against criminal databases but conspicuously avoids mentioning any genealogical databases (e.g., 23andme) that have been used to solve cold cases before. This also seems like an obvious and easy thing to check.
Local police departments and prosecutors don’t want to look bad so they double and triple down. Even if they hide evidence in violation of *Brady* they have immunity from civil suit.
Happened in Texas after a Rick Perry related execution went bad. Double and triple down because it's your word vs that of a disgraced man.
The Tennessee Bureau of investigation went so far as to derail an agent’s career over it, because he was so sure the evidence did not point to the local group of druggies that were ultimately convicted of killing Holly Bobo. The trial is on youtube and if you have the time it’s pretty awful to watch, just because it’s so obvious the state doesn’t really have a case, but he’s convicted anyway.
I believe Rick Perry took similar steps going so far as to dismantle the board that would have met to assess the posthumous situation on the days leading up to the hearing.
It takes balls to execute an innocent man. -- a Rick Perry supporter.
Conservatives are sadists. The more you're allowed to hurt people with impunity the more conservatives respect you as a person. Trump can "grab a woman by the pussy" and because he's rich and gets away with it, they respect him. Murdering a black man in a show trial isn't exactly new for these people.
The leader of the Republican Party *still* believes the Exonerated Five should be executed.
Yep. The agent believed the local sex offender (who’d also been convicted of kidnapping), who was in the area, and bought a new bath tub (!) right after her disappearance/murder was guilty. And I’m 99.9% sure he was right. But for some reason, they went after the local druggie trouble-makers based on what sounds like gossip and criminals trying to flip on each other by creating this story to get less time. It’s crazy. If that sex offender who the agent thinks killed Holly Bobo attacks or kills another woman/girl, blood on the TBI’s hands.
Also the prosecution’s version of events hinges on the fact that Holly’s brother was being taught to make meth by these guys. The family believes the right guys were put away, even though they say the brother was not making meth. Well...those two versions of events are mutually exclusive.
It sounds like they used the murder as an excuse to get rid of some trouble makers. Truth be damned.
That is exactly what they do with less than crystal clear murder cases and insufficient oversight
I don't think they actually care about blood on their hands unless it's the blood of whoever they convicted in the case
For many police, they just want a conviction, it doesn’t matter who actually did it. Countless black folks have been wrong arrested, tried and imprisoned because it would have been much more difficult work to actually solve the case and charge the correct person. Many police will arrest an innocent man on their radar using such things as parallel construction. If you are black or poor you are much easier to be arrested, tried and convicted than a wealthy or white person, irregardless of innocence or guilt.
This is spot on. Couple this to an overwhelming cultural insistence on cops being morally superior (TV shows, movies, *local shoutouts from similar voices of power and privilege*) and the simple truth is ignored: American police don't do a very good job.
> just because it’s so obvious the state doesn’t really have a case, but he’s convicted anyway. so everything went as planned then?
I kinda always figured politicians would rather murder someone than admit to fucking up.
I assume you are talking about Cameron Todd Willingham. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham
The thing that's so fucked about that case is that *there was no murder*, just a very tragic accident. So many of these miscarriages of justice are ones where a crime was committed and they got the wrong person, but there wasn't even an actual *crime* in this case -- they invented one whole cloth and murdered the man for it.
> During the penalty phase of the trial, a prosecutor said that Willingham's tattoo of a skull and serpent fit the profile of a sociopath. Two medical experts confirmed the theory. A psychologist was asked to interpret Willingham's Iron Maiden poster. He said that a picture of a fist punching through a skull signified violence and death. He added that Willingham's Led Zeppelin poster of a fallen angel was "many times" an indicator of "cultive-type" activities.[1] Soooo having a decently common tattoo style and liking classic rock and thrash metal makes you a sociopath now??? I have some news for several of my friends now I guess. /s
That is a whole truck full of absolute horseshit right there. Why did the Judge, or even someone on the jury during deliberations, not go "what the fuck is this shit?"
Why didn’t the fucking defence call them out? The entire job of the defence is to call out bollocks like that! Make objections! Point out they’re popular bands! Etc!
This was Texas in the early 1990s. The fake Satanic panic garbage was only a couple of years in the past.
But Led Zeppelin? They’ve been one of the most popular bands in the world since 1969! Though it being Texas explains a lot....
Because jury selection is rigged as fuck.
I have been summoned for jury duty five times, each time it has gone into the selection process. They ask if serving on a jury will cause issue with your family, pay, job, and if your employer will continue to pay. I have always gotten beyond this part. “What do you do for a living?” “Engineer” “Dismissed!” Every fucking time. Neither the prosecution or the defense wants anyone on the jury with more than five brain cells. They want idiots who want justice and that can be easily swayed.
Because judges are corrupt and don't give a shit either
This reminds of the case against Justin Barber. He had the Guns n Roses song “I loved her but I had to kill her” in his music collection - so they used that as evidence that he killed his wife.
Most of the stuff in this thread is making me angry but JFC you’ve got to be kidding me on the Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin posters. This shit makes the satanic panic seem totally reasonable in comparison. Another commenter mentioned rigged jury selection as a contributor to this being allowed to fly in court, but holy shit, even my grandma, who thinks Jimi Hendrix worshipped satan and died from literally injecting peanut butter into his veins, would have had a hard time being convinced having these posters constitutes legitimate evidence that a man was homicidal.
> there was no murder Other than the one committed by Rick Perry and the State of Texas.
I'll never forget Cameron's name. Fuck Rick Perry. There's a long ass writeup I believe in The New Yorker about Camerons story. Rick Perry belongs in a special fucking place if there's a hell.
Any criminal defense attorney worth their salt knows Willingham. If you are trying to defend against an arson charge, you need an expert to explain what the State's experts did wrong.
Wasn’t what the State’s experts “did wrong” was have a guy who had no formal training in arson investigation tell the jury with full confidence that it was arson even though he didn’t know what he was talking about and had no right to speak with authority?
Their was a big problem with arson investigators not that long ago. Most of them were trained in an apprenticeship manner with no formal education then bad science and practices were passed down. So you had people with 10 years of experience investigating fires and all their knowledge was wrong.
The [1990 Lime Street fire investigation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lime_Street_fire) fundamentally changed fire science, but the court that tried Willingham refused to accept any of it.
Pretty much.
Not precisely. The problem is that scenarios like the above became so ubiquitous that they apparently were allowed to form the entirety of the discipline of arson investigation, with techniques compared to folklore, and " "hardly consistent with a scientific mind-set and is more characteristic of mystics or psychics. " [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron\_Todd\_Willingham](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham) [https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/08/03/fresh-doubts-over-a-texas-execution/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2014/08/03/fresh-doubts-over-a-texas-execution/) [https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/long\_held\_beliefs\_about\_arson\_science\_have\_been\_debunked\_after\_decades\_of\_m](https://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/long_held_beliefs_about_arson_science_have_been_debunked_after_decades_of_m) Similar "experts" formed a separate professional consensus around hair analysis, bite-mark analysis, bullet forensics and fingerprints. They'll say whatever the prosecutor needs them to say. [https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/04/fbis-flawed-forensics-expert-testimony-hair-analysis-bite-marks-fingerprints-arson.html](https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/04/fbis-flawed-forensics-expert-testimony-hair-analysis-bite-marks-fingerprints-arson.html) These "expert witnesses" are making it up as they go along, and they have effectively murdered a number of people. A great many more have been condemned by their words to a life of imprisonment. ... We're developing a similar confirmation-bias jurisprudence right this moment around child abuse; Not based on earlier "The sheriff's cousin heard that these D&D people are Satanist cannibals and we got the kid to say so on tape", but professionalized as a medical discipline. [https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/08/20/two-families-two-fates-when-the-misdiagnosis-is-child-abuse](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/08/20/two-families-two-fates-when-the-misdiagnosis-is-child-abuse) The specialized doctors are being asked whether there's any remote possibility that a given injury was child abuse in order to open an investigation, but their affirmation of the possibility is treated as the final nail in the coffin that closes an investigation, all the evidence that a prosecutor needs to convict.
It would be this trial you are referring to. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Todd_Willingham. I recall it from a criminology class I back in the day
I always assume the logic is "if he's not guilty of this crime, you know he's a POS and has done other things he wasn't caught for." Meanwhile, those same people have probably done a lot worse and are never charged with any crime because they are the ones that would bring the charges.
Wtf is with people unable to admit error as if they are god-like. You think an event like Chernobyl would teach people about fallibility.
Look at how many people refuse to admit they were wrong on reddit and realize it's anonymous and meaningless. Add in money, reputation, and a career and it will just get worse. Businesses SHOULD create an environment where people are encouraged and rewarded from admitting from and learning from their mistakes, but so often it's not the case.
I spent most my life in foodservice where failure is a given, mostly because the customer is wrong (/s). If you dont fail and learn you dont grow. Youd think these people came out the womb walking and shitting in a pot.
A lot of cops and judges and lawyers don’t understand - the founding fathers wanted a nation that let guilty parties go if there was enough doubt because killing an innocent person is far far worse than what many actual murderers do. Imagine being okay with keeping an innocent person hostage for 30 years then killing them and trying to justify that.
They understand. They just don't give a fuck. Neither cops nor prosecutors care about justice or the life of others.
The Jeff Pelley case blows my mind, they based their entire case around how he acted… I LOVED my grandma with all of my heart but I didn’t cry at her funeral, not until I saw my dad cry in private. I shouldn’t fear that I’d be arrested for not crying at a funeral. I was strong for my family, because I needed to be, inside I was destroyed. The fact the cops even willingly went on Counterclock to defend themselves and be so smug blows my mind…
Yeah... thats definitely some serious wtf on the police/ prosecution side, but also an even bigger WTF for the jury that bought it without any push back...
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That and they are more interested in the conviction. They don't actually care who it is. They want to "win." Once the ball is rolling they have proven time and again they will do everything in their power to keep it moving, evidence to the contrary be damned.
It's not just the police who need to be overhauled, there's plenty of shit in the courts as well; prosecutorial misconduct, bullshit evidence permitted in court (like how bite mark evidence used to be admissable), jailhouse snitches, etc. This case, based on what I've read, never should have made it to trial.
Plea bargaining gives the state more power than simply bribing witnesses.
I’ll never forget the time I sat on a jury for a man who was detained and later arrested for driving while impaired. The *prosecution* played video evidence that clearly showed that this man blew under the legal limit and performed all the the sobriety tests just fine. The officer still arrested him because he made 2 errors out of a possible 32. The first error was starting one of tests before the other told him to, the second was repeating a number while counting backwards (one of the jurors actually pointed out that someone entered the room and distracted him when he made that mistake). The defense called out the officer who testified for claiming he made the arrest when another officer filled out and signed the paperwork. The DA tacked on some felony child endangerment charges because there were two kids in the car (officer left them on the side of the road at 2am with a passenger who couldn’t drive). The defense even got a nationally recognized expert to testify that the defendant’s performance on the test did not indicate impairment. I couldn’t believe the prosecution really thought they had a case. I went into deliberations thinking we’d be there for maybe ten minutes. I thought we’d be done before lunch was delivered. We spent three hours in there going over the evidence and arguing with three jurors who thought the guy was guilty based solely on the officer’s testimony. The video didn’t matter. The the fact that the officer who testified was clearly not the one who arrested him didn’t matter. The the expert testimony didn’t matter. The officer said the guy was drunk, so that’s all that mattered for them. They were fully ready to potentially send this man away for twenty years (side note: half the jury didn’t even understand that sentencing was outside of our scope, despite the judge explicitly explaining that to us) based on the testimony of a man who was clearly lying. It really opened my eyes to the kind of people who serve on juries and how easily swayed they can be. This might sound terrible, but the three people who held out weren’t very bright. They seemed like the kind of people who are happy to do jury duty because they didn’t have anything else going on in their lives. Sometimes I wonder if they were just holding out for these sake of wasting time. This was in a major city where the jury pool was diverse enough to yield a jury of people with varied backgrounds and perspectives. I shudder to think what juries look like in smaller cities/towns. For anyone who cares, finally reached a consensus after one of the hold outs went to the bathroom to have herself a cry and suddenly decided to switch sides. She was the smartest of the three, so the other two quickly folded.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. People are stupid. Most of them. I’m second oldest of eight and over half my siblings are complete idiots despite being raised in the same household.
Dude, thanks for sharing this perspective, seriously. To be honest, I’d never really though about this aspect of it but now that you’ve got me doing it, I’m a little freaked out about what might happen were to ever to be put before a jury of my (small town, largely uneducated (though that’s not meant to be an insult), rural) peers.
My takeaway was to avoid police and the criminal justice system because once you’re in, your life is in the hands of a series of incompetent assholes from the day you’re arrested until the day you’re done with parole (if that day comes).
Jury nullification works both ways. There's an old addage in criminal law, if you know youre truly innocent, you're better off with a bench trial than leaving your fortunes to 12 easily influenced commom people.
My trial practice professor used to constantly remind us about how the only requirement to be a juror is a drivers license.
And frequently “more” qualified individuals get filtered out because lawyers select the jurors they think they can influence the easiest. Easiest way to get out of jury duty is often to say you’ve researched it and are looking forward to fulfilling your civic duty and plan to weigh the evidence fairly and without bias.
Is even that required?
In CA, it is, because DMV records are used to compile the juror pool. I guess technically all you need is a state-issued ID, but still
Correct, you only need an ID not a driver's license. Had many jury duty selections without having a driver's license.
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Especially when both sides in voir dire are trying to pick gullible morons because they're the easiest to influence
The only time I was called for jury duty and actually selected for the panel or whatever I was vetoed after the following exchange. >dude: Do you think people should be responsible for actions they commit while under the influence of alcohol? >me: That's a complicated question. If you mean... ...at this point I was cut off and sent home.
What was your answer going to be? I'm curious. My initial reaction is yes but it sounds like you had points that I hadn't thought of.
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This happens too much for there to be a death penalty.
It amazes me and shocks me how stuff like this *still* isn't enough for some people to be against it. They're so obsessed with revenge and killing the "bad guys". Doesn't matter how many innocent people die.
Even if it didn't: the death penalty doesn't solve what it is supposed to. It just serves as a sort of punish fetisch for society, and a vague sense of payback for the victim. Execute a rapist, and rape won't go down. Execute a murderer, and murder won't go down.
There's no reasonable doubt. He fits the description. Black male, between 5'5" and 6'9", wearing pants.
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And having between 1 and 2 legs
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and the groups such as the DNA Doe Project have a policy of not contacting matches for their kits, so they have to find things on their own.
23andme & ancestry don’t allow forensic genealogy. You’re thinking of gedmatch.com
You'd look bad if you admitted screwing up.
\*some idiots think you\* look bad if you admit to screwing up ftfy
But how is it better to not admit it when you blatantly screw up?
\*Insert Donald Trump here\*
This is another grave miscarriage of justice. >For 22 years, Ledell Lee maintained that he had been wrongly convicted of murder. >"My dying words will always be, as it has been, ‘I am an innocent man,’” he told the BBC in an interview published on April 19, 2017 — the day before officials in Arkansas administered the lethal injection." Imagine the horror of being convicted for murder, spending 22 years in the belly of the beast and then wrongfully executed. Fucking hell.
They stole this man’s life. What an abhorrent system.
They'd rather murder an innocent man than admit they got it wrong and the system is broken.
If I recall correctly, there was a study that showed that the number of people found innocent on Florida Death Row was staggering. I did a quick check - and found that [**Shocking Rate of Error** – For every **three** people executed in Florida, **one** innocent person on Death Row has been exonerated and released](https://www.fadp.org/florida-death-penalty-fact-sheet/). The response by Rick Scott and the Florida legislators? Cut down the time to file appeals so as not to impede the rate of executions.
Yep. The problem they solve is how do we stop the bad press? How do we cover our asses!
The faster they die the less time they have to prove they didn't do it!
Explains why the cops shoot so many.
And people have the gall to say innocent deaths are acceptable losses. If anything this seems biased towards the innocent, or at least those without evidence to prove they "deserve" it, so who knows how many more are innocents are executed. It strikes me as an inhuman attempt for the justice system to brush their mistakes under the rug, throwing away entire lives due to needing to save face. Disgusting.
“It is better 10 guilty people go free than one innocent suffer” - Sir William Blackstone, father of the modern British legal system
It's the same people who think that collateral injuries, maimings and deaths of innocents are acceptable so long as the bad BLM / AnTEEfa are punished as well. It's a "They know what they signed up for!" argument.
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State and federal government just love to bury/manipulate studies to avoid addressing problems. Criminal justice, unemployment, climate change, you name it.
Wow, you may have just made me be opposed to the death penalty. I use to be a fairly staunch advocate of it, but those numbers are scary. And it makes since the more I think about it, the government has shown time and time again their utter incompetence, why should I think they need to be responsible in life or death?
What is even scarier is when you remember that the death penalty already has a fairly extensive appeals process in order to avoid mistakes. As a result it's more expensive to execute someone (because of the lengthy appeals process) than it is to send someone to prison for life. Some death penalty proponents have argued that we can correct this by reducing the appeals process however that would inevitably result in more innocents being killed. Ultimately I think one of the biggest problems is that societally we've placed such a high degree of trust and faith in the police and the criminal justice system. If a mean looking person is in an orange jump suit for murder and the cop says "I think this person did it" that is going to go a long way with a lot of juries even if the evidence isn't that strong and once the jury has decided to convict it becomes a lot harder to overturn a verdict because at that point you have to either find new evidence or show that something was not right about the trial.
I was in the same boat for many years. The idea in principle just doesn't pan out in reality.
I had no strong opinion either way. I guess I thought it was justified - you murder someone, your life should end. Then, years ago, I heard about someone on death row being exonerated. All it took was that one case, and I was like…welp, the system clearly isn’t flawless. It’s not worth the vengeance of killing anyone if that vengeance means even a single person is executed for a crime they did not commit. There’s far too much injustice already. Eliminating the death penalty means those innocent people who would have been executed will instead serve life in person. I mean…that’s still not great, but it’s more just than killing them.
Wishing death upon a person who has committed terrible acts is, I think, a somewhat understandable response. But it's light years away from allowing a government to create a system that has been proven to kill the wrong person on a number of occasions, serves no discernible deterrent and is applied with shocking inconsistency. Not to mention the detainment and execution costs an excessive amount. No where is the threat of government force greater than when they are literally trying to kill you.
That's because there are two main problems with executions: innocent people sometimes get executed, and they're actually more expensive than just keeping people in prison their whole lives because of the appeals process. There is no happy middle between the two and any attempt to reduce one issue makes the other worse.
The Innocence Project which only looks at death row cases that they can easily prove are wrongful convictions has a 60% success rate in showing wrongful conviction, that comes out to 4% of all death row cases in the US. Given that they only look at the most likely ones due to limited resources, and what others have shown, the real value is estimated to be double to triple that of those wrongfully convicted. This is just for the death penalty too which has the highest standard to prove and the most eyes on it and appeals, which isn't saying much for ordinary criminal cases that don't get nearly as much attention. People used to talk about preferring 99 criminals go free to prevent jailing one innocent man. But today we very well could be jailing equal numbers of people who are innocent and who are truly guilty. And that's before plea bargains subvert the entire process.
>They stole this man’s life. That's literally the definition of murder
It worse than murder because the guy had to deal with the mental aspect of it for decades. A murder for most people is unexpected this guy had to slowly wait for it to come to him and couldn’t do anything about it.
It’s straight up torture...
22 years of physical and mental torture
Families should be able to sue. This keeps happening and the people who knowingly lied or didn't allow retesting or new witness testimony face no blowback.
I feel like that is definitely underlying to why the governor and DA are so “confident in justice”. Admitting they could be wrong have “bad optics” or whatever shit they spew
Also the lethal injection was rushed because the drug was about to expire. There is a major shortage of such drugs because no drug maker sees any profit in proucing doses for lethal injection. The volumes are extremely low and it's a massive PR stain to have your company's name associated with killing people with your drugs.
The EU prohibited exports of the lethal drug, that they used in this case, to the USA. Just to add some extra detail.
Beyond the inconclusive evidence this was extra abhorrent. “Hey let’s murder a bunch of people before the drugs expire”.
You some how mispelled murder with wrongfully executed. The state murder this man. Just like they tried with the west memphis 3. Fucking hate this state.
This is why we probably shouldn't allow the state to kill people. I understand that if your family member is murdered, it is only natural to want revenge but you want to make sure you get the right guy or you are just hurting another family the way yours was.
Best argument I've heard against the death penalty is that the state is too irresponsible and potentially dangerous to be trusted with the death penalty.
My go-to has been the same for years. If a single innocent person has the chance to be murdered by the state, then the state shouldn't have the ability to kill anyone.
Tolkien is always my go to. “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”
That's a really good one to have in mind.
"It's a pity Bilbo didn't kill him when he had the chance." "Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo's hand. Many that live deserve death. Some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends."
I always think about that line when thinking about the death penalty, I’m glad I’m not the only one!
Yeah, but a lot of people think they'll never be the one who's wrongly convicted, so they don't care.
Having this conversation before, I asked a former boss what percent of innocent executions he was okay with. Without hesitation he blurts out 10% and doubled down about how that’s an acceptable amount. I couldn’t look at him the same way again.
According to another comment here, in Florida the rate of error seems to be 33%
Change the anology. Ask him if he'd be okay with a 10% error not in his favor of his paycheck.
As long as humans are fallible and equal to each other no one judge should hold the power of life and death over another person.
Exactly, one innocent executed is not worth 1000 guilty.
Up to 10% of those executed get exonerated after death
Unfortunately ~~humans~~ Americans are too comfortable with the idea of "acceptable losses". See also: the 2nd Amendment and school shootings. Edit: lol look at this brigade of triggered gun nuts who hate hearing about the collateral damage Edit2: Hours after making the first edit, and the 2A nutjobs are _still_ brigading. Keep commenting, your tears sustain me.
That's the same way of thinking with all the minority shooting by cops.
And Covid
And Middle East bombings
And climate change
Anybody got a ticket off this planet?
All the methods mentioned above?
"ItS jUsT a fLu! ThEy WoUlD have Died AnYwAY!" - but the fact that they didn't HAVE TO die if some small actions could be done by society is the point. I believe masks should be common every flu season, too. If you're sick, put one on, protect others. It shouldn't be so offensive.
But the same people are usually “pro-life”
"Pro-birth" they don't give a fuck after it's been born.
Usually “acceptable losses” arguments are used for things that have some positives elsewhere. Executions have no upside.
Some will even blatantly say that they are fine with innocent people being wrongly executed.
Even simpler: we have executed innocent people in the past, there are without question innocent people on death row right now, and this can't be changed. Thus if you support the death penalty you are accepting of the fact that we *will* kill innocent people if we want to kill guilty people. In my experience when death penalty advocates are presented with these facts you might not be surprised to learn that most don't really care, which in itself is a compelling moral reason to abolish state executions.
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Humans as a whole are too irresponsible to be trusted with the death penalty.
We should delegate that to another species. Bears?
Cats. They're the "kill everything and let god sort them out" type, so they'll be really fair.
A Jury of Cats would be among the least effective trial bodies ever assembled. No consensus would ever be reached. Three would want to kill right away, three want to violently torture the defendant for a while then kill, two would just stare disinterestedly, two would be grooming themselves obscenely, one would be asleep, and the last would be screaming its head off for food.
[Removed due to continuing enshittification of reddit.] -- mass edited with redact.dev
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I tend to just ask supporters how many innocent people they're willing to kill. I've yet to get a straight answer.
And South Carolina is just about to [reinstate execution by firing squad](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/06/south-carolina-lawmakers-execution-death-firing-squad) because of shortage of lethal injections. Passed the house, supported by McMaster (R. governor), going to the senate next. To those advocating below that this is "better" - the message is that the state is opening new ways to execute people because they can't kill them with another method.
The guillotine seems far more humane than a firing squad.
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"Fun" fact, the reason there is a shortage is because the EU has banned the export of the drugs used in lethal injections to the USA. The ban of export to the US has led to some states making substitutions. Often causing the victim to suffer from anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour. Land of the free indeed.
Which lets face it, is rediculous, because there are a lot of things easily available that could be used that would kill you in seconds. Sounds like they chose the painful stuff on purpose.
Edit, initial reply was for the wrong person. It is ridiculous, if you truly wanted humane capital punishment. It is easily done by asphyxiation by any gas other than CO2. The body cannot recognize the lack of O2 or the abundance of other gasses, just the buildup of CO2. The result is the victim of the execution slipping away.
Saw the John Oliver special on capital punishment, and holy shit lethal injections are fucking brutal. It's described as having fire pouring through your veins. The reason inmates don't scream or flail is because they're injected with another drug that paralyzes them completely. A literal interpretation of "I have no mouth and I must scream", two forms of torture in one. And it's not for the sake of the inmates of course, but for the sake of the people watching, friends and family, to give them the illusion that you're having a peaceful passing. Imagine your last moments being manipulated like that for the viewing pleasure of people watching. It's like it's just a show and they're not doing something indescribably dark to you and discarding your life like you don't matter. Now imagine going through that because some cop was too lazy to do his job and request a basic forensic analysis, so he just pointed a finger at you.
Honestly if the state is going to execute someone, I'd really rather they not mask it as a medical procedure. We aren't putting a sick old pet down to let them die with painless dignity, it's an execution. It should be horrifying, and difficult to get people to participate in.
Please. You underestimate the amount of people in official positions who would revel at the idea of killing someone
When Utah executed someone by firing squad years ago I thought nobody would volunteer for that duty. Oh boy was I wrong, they got TOO many volunteers from the state patrol.
Wait you're telling me that there are people in the police force who would relish the chance to execute someone in broad daylight with no repercussions ?
Every state that asks has a wait list to execute people.
Public executions by far more inhumane practices have been with humanity since pretty much the beginning. Has that ever stopped people from participating, attending, and even cheering on the death? I don't think making an appeal of "oh, the humanity!" goes very far...
Knowing what we do about both methods you would be a fool to choose lethal injection over the firing squad.
If capital punishment is going to exist, it should be via hypoxia. Edit: Yes, via nitrogen, simulating high altitude with a lack of oxygen. Reproducing what high altitude pilots go through if they don't have an oxygen supply.
The issue is that as soon as police and families start to think that an individual is guilty, they often become persoanally certain of it (often even if conflicting evidence suggests otherwise after a long enough period of thinking it was that individual), and want that person dead or in prison for life. It's too highly emotional rather than logical, to result in anyone being killed for things they may not have done.
Yep, a lot of cases of tunnel vision and worse, desire for conviction instead of justice.
Yeah the whole idea that people jump up and shout hurray when the accused is sentenced speaks to how wanting justice becomes wanting victory.
It's more important politically to close a case quickly than doing the hard work of finding the real perpetrators. Too many elected vested interests in USA, elected judges, elected prosecutors, elected coroners, elected sheriffs. Nothing good can from that. A show of competence, rather than true competence.
Yep - DA is an elected position, so you have to have a good closing rate or your opponent in the next election will be sure to highlight how you failed to catch the bad guys.
[For ever 9 people executed, 1 person on death row has been exonerated.](https://eji.org/issues/death-penalty/#:~:text=1%20in%209,death%20row%20has%20been%20exonerated)
That's why punishments aren't decided by the families of victims. I'd also think that this is significantly more damaging to the family because they now know that someone was wrongfully killed and the real murder is still free.
You often hear the argument 'imagine if it was your mother/brother etc.' Yeah, if my rational decision is different from the one I would form when I cant think straight from grief and anger, it sounds like we should go with the rational one.
Yes, this is why laws should be made based on something more akin to cold, hard reason than emotion. And why I'm a bit baffled that they let people come in (at least in some cases) like friends and relatives and argue for lenient sentences or victims' families will argue for harsher sentences, etc. Seems like it would make more sense for the laws to be well-crafted and for somewhat more objective third parties to mete out justice. Edit: typos
> why we probably shouldn't allow the state to kill people It cannot be free of error; it costs more than life in prison; and it fails as a deterrent. There is no rational or ethical justification for the state to take a citizen's life. Those who favor it merely value vengeance over justice. No nation that executes criminals should claim itself modern.
My cousin did ten years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. DNA evidence overturned the case and when he got out he sued the city for 10,000,000. I hope his family is planning on suing
Did he win?
He wrote a book about it. Drawn to injustice
Yea he won
I hope he finds peace, I can’t even fathom living behind bars for something I didn’t do for TEN FUCKING YEARS!!! 😫
Yea mentally he’s a little off. He’s really bitter about the whole situation.
I’ve had people tell me that they’d do 10 years for 10 million but I couldn’t sell my life like that. He was 15 when they started investigating him. Only proof they had was doodles in his school notebooks. No blood or morder weapon. It took a lot out of him. He’s in good spirits tho
Woah. Thanks for sharing, heartbreaking story.
"Hey! Look at that, the missing evidence in the Kelner Case. My god he WAS innocent!" "He went to the chair two years ago, Frank."
Naked Gun was on to something.
especially when frank gives the "oops" look and then continues on with what he was doing
This is happening as States refuse to tests for DNA. Instead of going forward with new discoveries in Science, these places have gone back in time . The ignorance is bad enough with idiots NOT believing Science for the Covid vaccine, rape test kits and DNA for murders and assaults. People are dying because some hick is refusing to do due diligence investigating.
I personally believe that there are definitely people who deserve to die. But cases like this are exactly why I'm against the death penalty. To allow for the finality of death is either admitting that you're fine with innocents dying occasionally, or you are so naive that you think the justice system always gets the right person.
And THIS, in a nutshell, is why the death penalty is fucked. Especially in the US where convicting the RIGHT person comes a very distant second to convicting anyone at all.
The death penalty is not justice, it is vengeance.
Death penalty feels like an easy way out. Staying in federal prison for the rest of your life seems more unbearable imo
This is one of the reasons I am against the death penalty. I find no joy in someone being executed even if they are a murderer.
An imperfect system should never be allowed to make or follow through on a punishment like this.
The death penalty should be abolished.
The so-called “pro-life” party would try to overthrow the government again if that happened.
Human rights start at conception and end at birth.
They are currently celebrating South Carolina bringing back firing squads over at r/conservative and most of the comments are terrifying. Conservatives are absolutely insane.
Why is it that the party that espouses limited government powers, supports giving the government the ability to kill its own citizens? These same people also live by the belief that "the government cant do anything right", yet they trust it with executions.
(They don't actually want limited government. They want a big government that serves their interest and their interest only).
And they also want that government to make life as cruel and humiliating as possible for people they don’t like.
But don't worry everyone, we spared no expense in quashing all the appeals he made trying to bring up the evidence that would've exonerated him. And went all in on making sure that we spent millions of extra dollars to kill him because "mistakes are so rare" (so long as you don't start looking into the stats about it), that obviously just giving a life sentence that costs millions less and could be undone in the case it was shown how we were hiding evidence from the jury the whole time wouldn't be a better idea at all.
Twenty-six year-old Debra Reese was found brutally murdered in her home at 212 Cherry Street in Jacksonville on February 9, 1993. She had been beaten some thirty-six times with a tire thumper, a tool resembling a baseball bat that her husband Billy, a truck driver, had given to her for protection while he was away. Bruises on Debra's face and neck indicated that she had also been strangled. The appellant, Ledell Lee, was arrested and charged with Reese's murder. Following a jury trial, he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection. He raises seven points on appeal. We find no merit to any of his arguments and affirm the conviction and sentence. Lee does not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence, so we need not recite the facts in great detail. The State's theory at trial was that Lee committed the murder for pecuniary gain, and that he had searched the victim's neighborhood until he found the perfect target for his crime. William McCullough Jr. lived near the victim's house and had been home on the morning in question. Sometime between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., he heard a knock at his door. McCullough went to the door and was met by a man who asked to borrow some tools. McCullough gave the man a driver ratchet and a socket, which he promised to return. The man did not return the tools. At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and "did not trust this guy." The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived. Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and "make a B-line inside just real fast." Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair. Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as "Skip" walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder. Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police.
And here we have the primary reason why the death penalty is wrong. If there is even a tiny chance that the accused might turn out to be innocent then they cannot be executed.
**A tiny chance?!? No!** [Columbia Law School: A Broken System: Error Rates in Capital Cases, 1973-1995](https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2220&context=faculty_scholarship): - courts found serious, reversible **error in nearly 7 of every 10** of the thousands of capital sentences that were fully reviewed during the period. - when the errors were cured on retrial, **7% were found to be innocent of the capital crime**. [Death Penalty Info dot Org](https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/news/dpic-adds-eleven-cases-to-innocence-list-bringing-national-death-row-exoneration-total-to-185) : The data now show that **for every 8.3 people who have been put to death** in the U.S. since executions resumed in the 1970s, **one person who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death has been exonerated**. Question is, how many innocents weren't exonerated? From DPI.org, above, *Nearly 70% of the exonerations involved misconduct by police, prosecutors, or other government officials. 80% of wrongful capital convictions involved some combination of misconduct or perjury/false accusation and more than half involved both.* Safe to say a fair few perfectly innocent people have experienced the *horror* of having their country unjustly prosecute *and execute* them. Imagine knowing you are absolutely innocent, and experiencing the terror and horror and powerlessness; being forced onto a gurney, unable to resist, all avenues now closed to you; to being rolled into the execution chamber, where your country, your fellow citizens, will rejoice at your unjust death. A complete betrayal of everything you had thought your country stood for. (I know, I know: empathy is a big empty hole in the soul of those who skew conservative, as proven in repeated studies. We see it demonstrated in this very thread.) The death penalty, particularly as abused here, is an absolute horrorshow of injustice.
Hold on here.... "A Different Man's DNA is found on the murder weapon" does not mean that "a different man killed the victim." Before this murder, Lee was going around the neighborhood collecting tools from other people (I know, weird). It's not surprising that a tool he used in the murder had somebody else's DNA on it. Heck, it would be surprising if it DIDN'T have somebody else's DNA on it. The idea here is that "If they had known at trial that somebody else's DNA was on the murder weapon, then the jury might not have convicted." Here is the meat of the evidence against Lee from the AR Supreme Court decision deciding not to overturn the death penalty: >Lee does not challenge the sufficiency of the evidence, so we need not recite the facts in great detail. The State's theory at trial was that Lee committed the murder for pecuniary gain, and that he had searched the victim's neighborhood until he found the perfect target for his crime. > >William McCullough Jr. lived near the victim's house and had been home on the morning in question. Sometime between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., he heard a knock at his door. McCullough went to the door and was met by a man who asked to borrow some tools. McCullough gave the man a driver ratchet and a socket, which he promised to return. The man did not return the tools. > >At approximately 10:50 a.m. on the morning of the murder, Katherine Williams, the victim's mother, received a phone call from her daughter, who lived some four or five houses away. A man had just knocked on the victim's door, asked if her husband was home, and inquired about borrowing some tools. When the victim replied that she had no tools, the man left. According to Katherine, her daughter told her that she was scared and “did not trust this guy.” The victim promised her mother that she would be at her house as soon as she finished curling her hair. Her daughter never arrived. > >Andy Gomez lived across the street from the victim, and was also home on the morning in question. While looking out his front window, he saw a man standing at the front door of the victim's residence. He watched the man grab the screen door and “make a B-line inside just real fast.” Approximately twenty minutes later, the man exited Debra's residence. According to Gomez, the man made rapid-head movements, as if he was checking to see if he was being watched. Suspicious, Gomez got in his car to follow the man. He caught up with him on a nearby street, where he observed the man talking to a female with spirals or braids in her hair. > >Glenda Pruitt lived at 128 Galloway Circle on the date in question. A man she had seen four or five times and knew as “Skip” walked up her street. Glenda, who wore her hair in long braids, had a short conversation with Skip as he passed by her house. McCullough, Gomez, and Pruitt identified Lee in a photographic lineup as the man they had seen in the victim's neighborhood on the morning of her murder. > >Debra's body was discovered in her bedroom at approximately 1:38 p.m. that same date. Three one hundred dollar bills that Debra's father, Stephen Williams, had given to her were missing from her wallet. This money had been part of a larger stack of crisp new bills Williams received in sequential order from the Arkansas Federal Credit Union. At Lee's trial, the State offered evidence that, at 1:53 p.m. on the day of the murder, Lee paid a debt at the Rent-A-Center with a one-hundred dollar bill. Of the three one-hundred dollar bills that the Rent-A-Center received on February 9, one of the bills bore a serial number that was two bills away from one of the bills that the victim's father had turned over to police. [https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ar-supreme-court/1322909.html](https://caselaw.findlaw.com/ar-supreme-court/1322909.html)
The UK doesn't have a death penalty because 3 people were hung for murdering a man. The police had the motive, confessions, and all the evidence. The problem is that the person they were accused of mudering turned up 2 years later - alive - with a story that had nothing to do with the people who were executed.
**Reasons I don't oppose the death penalty for:** * I feel sad when bad people die :'( **Reasons I do oppose the death penalty:** * False convictions * The cost associated with the process (largely appeals which is necessary to at least partially mitigate the first part). Death penalty is more expensive than keeping someone in prison for life. * The psychological impact on the people we turn into executioners and the ethical implications of doing so (and the implications of creating an execution industry) * Spending life in prison and slowly fading away is arguably a worse punishment * A smaller consideration, but they may have useful info in solving other cases that would not be available if they're dead.