His death sentence was almost IMMEDIATELY overturned - 2 years after conviction (that's light speed in capital trial terms). He was retried and was still convicted, but did not get the DP.
So actually he was reprieved from a mistaken conviction - but NOT from a death sentence.
Usually when something like this happens, something is fishy with the original trial. I notice that the DP was overturned for prosecutorial misconduct. That tells you that something's up right there. If a guy's guilty enough to get the chair or the gurney, there's no doubt of his guilt and no need for prosecutorial misconduct. Clearly the appeals court smelled something fishy.
We had a case like this in Georgia where a corrupt sheriff and some town bigwigs were shielding the real murderer, and they set up some poor innocent black guy to take the fall, forging police records and planting a shotgun, etc. The Georgia Supreme Court smelled a rat but couldn't quite put their finger on it -- they reversed the fall guy's conviction I think THREE times and kept sending it back, until eventually somebody talked and the whole case blew wide open.
Shall all of America suffer for the ills of a VERY few corrupt cases? Shall no one ever get the justice they deserve by seeing a criminal put ot death justly?
I agree that in death penalty cases there HAS to be conclusive proof before the sentence is handed down- however, it should not be doen away with because only a select few cases have either been corrupted, or later overturned due to new evidence. We need to be much more careful when handing otu death penalties, however, justice STILL needs be given to the victims.
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