I just finished reading Grisham's new (non-fiction) book "The Innocent Man". Highly recommended. A case study in ineptness and worse, on the part of the police, prosecutors, judges, the public defender system, juries, and mental health professionals, plus some details of this guy's 11 years on death row.


>I'm not sure you can say that it demonstrates the system is working. I say that because in practice, those cases should never have made it to that point to begin with. I'm not sure of the percentage of overturned or dismissed cases due to dna evidence, but at least some of them had nothing to do with dna. I was once a strong advocate of the death penalty in crime prevention. Some crimes are so violent and disgusting to warrant the same treatment in my mind. Now I am totally AGAINST it. I have seen too many cases where folks were found guilty who I believed were innocent. No system is perfect and that includes ours. Police officers are human and juries are human. Humans make mistakes. If I cannot sit on a jury and comfortably vote FOR the death of another human being (no matter how despicable), then I cannot support the death penalty. I just couldn't do it. Now if someone were to harm my child by some or any of the means death penalty cases are up for, there wouldn't be any
>need for the death penalty. I would have lost my mind by then and taken care of it myself.
>
>
>>>It doesn't take much time. Look at page 2:
>>>
>>>http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/FactSheet.pdf
>>
>>Ok, I looked at some of these. It looks like the system is working, with all these cases being overturned. I also looked at page 2. Those racist Californians! Probably in Berkeley!<g>
>>
>>I think maybe we should do like Castro, send our murderers to him, then we wouldn't have to worry about a wrongful death.