Re: OT America has lost its mind

FellKnight wrote:
On Apr 4 2006 1:38 PM, Ron Dworkin wrote:

The problem swith the death penalty T, is that mistakes are made. Its
bad enough to mistakenly have to live your life in jail. I have seen
estimates by people who study this kind of stuff that indicate as high
a number as 30% of the prison population is actually innocent. I
seriously doubt it is that high, but it is without question that the
number is significant. Why do you think which judge is sitting, who
the defence lawyers are, and jury selection are all so important?
Because many trials could go either way. So while you may not care if
a murderer is sentenced to death, what margin of error for innocent
people being sentenced to death are you willing to accept?

Speaking for myself, it is not about a margin for error. Once a person
has exhausted their legal recourse, their sentence should be carried out.

I agree with this. The problem I have is that the death penalty should
not be an option; not because of crimianl rights, but because there
should be zero tolerance for innocent people being put to death.

The legal system allows for a lot of double checking and appeals. Yes,
there have been mistakes before, but how much difference, really, is there
between someone who spends 20 years in jail mistakenly and someone who is
sentenced to death?

Also, the system and evidence are getting better and better every year
(DNA, etc).

Finally, whoever gave you that 30% number is full of ***.

I would be
very surprised if the number was higher than .3%

Why?

Like I said, I seriously doubt it is nearly as high as 30%. But IIRC
(I did a bunch of reading on this as an undergrad, but that was over 10
years ago now) the rate of exoneration for inmates in captial crimes is
1% (I am sure a stat like this is easy enough to look up if you
actually care). Therefore the percentage of inmates that are innocent
(unless guilty persons are being exonerated at this rate) is at least
1%. What percentage of the overall population is innoncent - who
knows, but given the human element in investigations and trials I would
not at all be surprised if it were much higher than the 1% that
acutally gets their get out of jail free card. I would bet it
approaches 5%.


Fell
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