Death Penalty

3 Pages 781 Words

On April 8, 2002, Ray Krone was released from prison in Arizona after DNA evidence proved that he was not responsible for the 1991 murder of a Phoenix bartender. Krone became the 100th person exonerated and released from death row since 1973. Convicted twice for a brutal murder, Krone spent ten years in prison, two of them on death row. The DNA evidence that ultimately proved his innocence also implicated the real murderer.

Unfortunately, Ray Krone’s story is not unique. As of February 2004, 113 inmates had been found innocent and released from death row. More than half of these have been released in the last 10 years. That means one person has been exonerated for every eight people executed.

A study by Columbia University professor James Liebman examined thousands of capital sentences that had been reviewed by courts in 34 states from 1973 to 1995. “An astonishing 82 percent of death row inmates did not deserve to receive the death penalty,” he said in his conclusion. “One in twenty death row inmates is later found not guilty.”

The vast majority of those exonerated were found innocent because someone came forward to confess committing the crime; key witness testimony was found to be illegitimate; or new evidence was found to support innocence

In many other cases, it was good fortune rather than the criminal justice system that established innocence. In several cases, college or law school students investigated cases and unearthed essential evidence. For example, students in an investigative journalism class at Webster University uncovered evidence of misconduct by prosecutors, who talked a witness into giving false testimony and withheld crucial trial evidence, and helped get a new trial for Louisiana death row inmate Richard Clay. If it had not been for the work of these students, an innocent person may have been put to death.

Although there has been much attention surrounding the use of DNA tes...