There should be NO doubt about these executions..
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Been clear for a long, long time that prosecutors cannot be trusted and defendants seldom get representation than can hold up.
That the death penalty STILL exists and sentences are carried out marks us as a blood-lust driven country and full of politicians who use it to stay in office.
Stop it NOW!
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I oppse the death penalty on principle. But there is an uncomfortable truth about convictions for any crimes, including murder. We probably have to tolerate some number of wrongful convictions. Setting the bar for conviction at exactly 100% proof and certainty would result in many criminal acts being unpunished. So the problem is, how many wrongful convictions can we tolerate versus how many unpunished crimes?
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A lot of these questions come up in cases of a single homicide. I think a better course of action is to reserve the ultimate penalty for convicts with multiple body counts, say school shootings. This seems to be the unwritten policy of Virginia prosecutors today, and I think it’s a fair balance of Natural Law/Divine Command and modern sensibilities.
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I am vehemently opposed to the death penalty and as a former prosecutor and public defender- though I have never tried a murder case- I have a balanced familiarity with the criminal justice system.
My fellow anti-death penalty crusaders, this case must not be our defining cause. Mr. Reed is unequivocally guilty and I would not hesitate to say otherwise.
Reed failed to testify at his own trial and his DNA was found inside the victim as well as on her breasts (the latter meaning the sexual assault was recent to the discovery of her body). Mr Reed’s DNA was also found inside multiple other rape victims within miles of the innocent victim in this case. One of those victims was a 12 year old girl. The other, a mentally handicapped woman.
Mr Reed’s attempts to claim that the relationship was consensual are belied by the mountain of evidence that this was a brutal rape, including the recent saliva on the victim (though he said he last had an encounter with her days before) and that he had assaulted other women per DNA evidence, belatedly claiming it was consensual.
My fellow NYT readers, you can be passionately against the death penalty, but still exercise your critical thinking skills and acknowledge this defendant is doubtless, guilty. I implore you to reject cognitive dissonance. That is the mark of a liberal and a true crucial thinker.
There are hundreds of innocent men in prison. Mr. Reed is not one of them.
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It's almost as if some state authorities take a perverse pride in executing the wrong people - to the extent that they even forbid examining evidence that might throw light on a case. Crazy!
5
OK, so we have proof that over 100 people have been executed by various states.
Saying that the formalities of the law was fulfilled is irrelevant. The Soviet Union filled the gulags while satisfying the letter fo their laws. Germany at one point killed millions of people while satisfying the letter of their laws.
Executing innocent people is wrong, and a legal framework that allows that to happen and then allows the perpetrators to shrug their shoulder and say they were just following the legal niceties is an evil legal framework.
So stop doing evil - it's not that hard.
4
We as a civilized society condemn murder so how can the courts sentence anyone to death?
Shouldn't we strive to be better than that?
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In addition to running new DNA tests in Death Row cases, society should be prioritizing resources to running DNA for all criminal cases. All those languishing rape kits... it's important to exonerate innocent people, and it's important to catch criminals, too. Most rapists are serial rapists, and the violent crimes against women described here may very well be from repeat offenders.
7
Seeking the death penalty for a crime should be a rare thing, and it should be for crimes where there is no credible reasonable doubt about the guilt of the convicted. I do not understand why so many cases with viable DNA evidence will not test it.
I think we need a change to our current prosecutorial legal system. Prosecutors are rewarded for winning cases ad putting people in jail, but too often it doesn't matter if the person locked up is actually innocent. The focus should not be on conviction rates; it should be on justice.
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As long as there is no statute of limitations on murder, there should be no statute of limitation on judicial misconduct in capital cases. Police and prosecutors who broke the law to get these wrongful convictions should be in prison.
This is aside from the fact that the death penalty is just dumb. It is more expensive than life imprisonment. It is unevenly applied. It is not a deterrent. And there is no "un do" when we get it wrong. It is a feel-good trope that wastes the taxpayer money.
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