Justice delayed is not justice denied for the 142 death row inmates exonerated as of Dec. 26, 2012. That number includes 12 in Texas. A rush to execution increases the likelihood of an innocent person being put to death. I am pro-life, meaning I am against abortion and against the death penalty. I have no problem with sentencing people to life without parole for heinous crimes, but most reasonable people would agree that innocent people have been executed. Fortunately, we now have the forensic technology that can more definitively determine innocence or guilt.
How many innocent people can you name who were executed in the past century in the United States? I don’t mean an armed robber who shot the victim in a non-lethal location but was later determined not to have fired the fatal shot, or a robber who claims to have gathered the money while his partner fired the fatal shot, I mean genuinely wasn’t part of the overall crime innocent people executed?
If it’s genuine innocence, that is a problem. If it’s a criminal who admits to having been part of the crime but claims not to have fired the fatal shot, I have trouble caring about the alleged “error”. BTW, if I was convicted of a crime I didn’t commit, I’d rather get a death sentence - that dramatically improves the odds of someone noticing the error that wrongly sent me to prison.