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Originally Posted by lookout123
Present me with the facts of a case where an innocent person was executed. Together we can go through the details on how the system failed and you can change my viewpoint.
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Unfortunately that's not all that likely. How many lawyers are going to fight to get a conviction overturned posthumously? Surely their main concern wold be to work on cases where they might have a chance of getting a conviction overturned before the sentence of death is carried out.
Interestingly, on the wiki page that shows overturned convictions where the death penalty has been passed, there are no posthumous examples given for the USA. There are however, a number of cases where the death penalty has already been commuted and the person is serving a life sentence. One of these was overturned 9 years after he was convicted when new DNA evidence which was not available at the time of his conviction showed he coulld not have committed the crime. Had his sentence not been commuted, there is a good possibility he;d already have been executed by the time DNA evidence was available. There are several such cases of people whose sentence had previously been commuted to life sentences and then later were cleared by new evidence.
It wuold be interesting to find out how many appeals are either sought or granted after execution has been carried out.
What I can point you to is a few examples of convictions where the death penalty has been carried out and where serious doubts as to the safety of the convictions have been raised. The site is partisan, but some of the testimonial evidence from people involved in the trials is fairly disturbing. Including jury members and witnesses for the prosecution:
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/exec...sibly-innocent
Here's one example from the list:
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Ruben Cantu Texas Convicted: 1985, Executed: 1993
A two-part investigative series by the Houston Chronicle casts serious doubt on the guilt of a Texas man who was executed in 1993. Ruben Cantu had persistently proclaimed his innocence and was only 17 when he was charged with capital murder for the shooting death of a San Antonio man during an attempted robbery. Now, the prosecutor and the jury forewoman have expressed doubts about the case. Moreover, both a key eyewitness in the state's case against Cantu and Cantu's co-defendant have come forward to say that Texas executed an innocent man.
Juan Moreno, who was wounded during the attempted robbery and was a key eyewitness in the case against Cantu, now says that it was not Cantu who shot him and that he only identified Cantu as the shooter because he felt pressured and was afraid of the authorities. Moreno said that he twice told police that Cantu was not his assailant, but that the authorities continued to pressure him to identify Cantu as the shooter after Cantu was involved in an unrelated wounding of a police officer. "The police were sure it was (Cantu) because he had hurt a police officer. They told me they were certain it was him, and that's why I testified. . . . That was bad to blame someone that was not there," Moreno told the Chronicle.
In addition, David Garza, Cantu's co-defendant during his 1985 trial, recently signed a sworn affidavit saying that he allowed Cantu to be accused and executed even though he wasn't with him on the night of the killing. Garza stated, "Part of me died when he died. You've got a 17-year-old who went to his grave for something he did not do. Texas murdered an innocent person."
Sam D. Millsap, Jr., the Bexar County District Attorney who charged Cantu with capital murder, said he never should have sought the death penalty in a case based on testimony from an eyewitness who identified a suspect only after police showed him Cantu's photo three seperate times.
Miriam Ward, forewoman of the jury that convicted Cantu, said the jury's decision was the best they could do based on the information presented during the trial. She noted, "With a little extra work, a little extra effort, maybe we'd have gotten the right information. The bottom line is, an innocent person was put to death for it. We all have our finger in that." (Houston Chronicle, November 20 & 21, 2005 and Associated Press, November 21, 2005).
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