>Mike - this news is very troubling, if it is indeed true.
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>If this still occurs today, with all the advances in forensics and police detective work, that would actually give me cause to reconsider my strong views on the death penalty.
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>I still maintain that anyone who truly kills in the first degree, deserves to be executed.
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>I have no problem with life in prison, with NO, repeat NO, chance of parole, for convicted murderers. Obviously, if a mistake was made and an innocent man wrongly convicted, the govt can release him and can make restitution to him. But what bothers me just as much is murderers who escape, are released and kill again, or kill other prisoners or prison guards while in prison - this occurs FAR more often than executing someone who is not guilty.

I have no doubt that is true. Still, morally we should do everything possible to avoid killing an innocent man. As the article points out, there is no way to bring him back.

I was not trying to start a general debate on the death penalty and will skip that part, other than to concede my bias that I think it's barbaric.

What I found really disturbing about the article was this guy was convicted based in no small part on the testimony of "expert witnesses." According to the words and experiments of the guy who sounds like the real expert, the information they were presenting to juries, and considered state of the art understanding of arson, was junk science.