Yet Another Walking Dead Man exonerated

[Fedaykin]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012...-man-death-row

"He walked out as the 300th prisoner in the US to be freed as a result of DNA testing and one of 18 exonerated from death row. With the help of science, he has been proved innocent of a crime for which the state of Louisiana spent 15 years trying to kill him."

'"We put more energy into a $50,000 contract dispute than went into the defence at the Damon Thibodeaux trial."'

"Being poor, Thibodeaux could not afford his own lawyer and was assigned a public defence attorney by the courts. His attorney happened to be a former detective who had retrained as a lawyer, and this was his first murder case. At the time of the trial he was, unbeknown to Thibodeaux, applying for a transfer to the same district attorney's office that was prosecuting his client."

"Not so Steven Kaplan. He cites academic studies that suggest that 2% to 4% of death-row inmates are probably innocent. "If that was the rate of failure of airplanes," he says, "would you fly?""


There are certainly crimes that merit a death sentence, but until we have a system that has no chance of conviction for the innocent, how can anyone still support the death penalty?