Did Texas execute an innocent man?

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

by justinchen • 17 years ago

33 45 17 years ago

jhancock• 17 years ago

Just based on the title, I'd have to say "more probable than any other state". I should probably have flagged this article, but 'eh.

rms• 17 years ago

Yes, they did. It is time for a national death penalty moratorium. This is not the first time.

This is a more straightforward read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cameron_Willingham

JimmyL• 17 years ago

And it certainly wasn't the first time, either.

amichail• 17 years ago

How is this any worse than the collateral damage of war?

Rod5• 17 years ago

By definition, collateral damage is unintended killing, whereas capital punishment is doubtlessly intended killing.

bkudria• 17 years ago

Woah - have you stopped beating your wife yet?

To play Devil's Advocate: this man was a citizen. A State has fundamentally failed when it has executed one of its citizens.

slyn• 17 years ago

The death penalty is far to permanent of a punishment to be wielded by organizations with such high false positive rates. We wouldn't put up with it with an anti-virus program or a SMART-esque hardware monitoring program, why do we put up with it when the price is not a few easily replicated digital files or some computer hardware, but rather an innocent persons _life_.

Capital punishment in it's current form is not a deterrence to crime, it doesn't fix the problems caused by the crimes it is punishing for (it doesn't bring back the murdered, etc), it's more expensive for the state (and therefore taxpayers) than life without parole, and innocents have died at the hands of overzealous police, judges, politicians, and public opinion. So the question then becomes, why do it?

sho3• 17 years ago

Why is the parent being voted down? It's a sound point.

This guy was collateral damage of the legal system, a (retroactively) unintended killing while we all heartily support the intended ones. The only thing different is the "retroactively" and even then the analogy holds, if the army bombs the wrong people then realises its mistake later.

Legion4• 17 years ago

Focusing on the death penalty is completely missing the point.

If you're writing code and something keeps throwing nasty exceptions, you don't remove the exception handling - you fix the code.

Death penalty isn't the problem (leaving aside the traditional death penalty debate for a moment). Innocent people being found guilty, often by highly (and unnecessarily) faulty process, is the problem.

Cutting out the death penalty just hides the problem. I'm not saying that it's a bad idea to avoid putting these people to death, but the actual problem needs to be identified and dealt with.

Cases of such magnitude need rigorous scientific oversight, not just the say-so of whatever self-proclaimed "expert" was on hand to drag into court that day.

jerf2• 17 years ago

While I still agree with your main points, it should be pointed out that any process that can be actually executed by real humans will throw up false positives. For that matter, any process actually executable by a benevolent AI will throw up a certain number of false positives, too. We need to be ready to deal with that.

So, both faulty process and the death penalty is the problem.

Rod5• 17 years ago

Comparing death penalty to exception handling is the most distasteful metaphor ever. The real problem is that death penalty does not serve as deterrence. That is the problem.

greendestiny2• 17 years ago

You're solution is to have a perfect system? That's not possible.

But to torture your analogy more, its like saying instead of having exception handling in your programming, or crash handling in your operating systems, simply don't make any mistakes. All that happens in reality are more serious consequences for the mistakes that do happen.

PostOnce2• 17 years ago

Summary: Eliminating the death penalty without fixing the trial process will still send innocent men to prison for a very long time.

Hard to do though.

steiger• 17 years ago

That's the most outrageous, devilish thing that can and eventually had happened or will happen with death penalty. Someday, we will know we killed an innocent man, and in that day we will ALL be murderers. We all being murderers, we should all be sentenced to death (the Death Penalty Paradox).

alextp• 17 years ago

Technically we would all be accomplices to murder (after all it is quite hard to find a not-Orient-Express scenario in which more than a couple of people kill another one), which does not usually get the death penalty, so paradox is avoided. I do agree with you, though :-)

adrianwaj2• 17 years ago

When there is a miscarriage of justice, those responsible for it must be brought to justice.

Eliezer2• 17 years ago

"I used to support the death penalty until I realized the government can't even run the Post Office." - my father, Moshe Yudkowsky

covercash• 17 years ago

All of the people that contributed to his execution with their b.s. science and swayed testimony need to be severely punished IMO. Maybe a prison sentence will deter these "experts" from claiming their findings are 100% correct without some sort of scientific proof.

This reminds me of a similar story I read recently about bite mark experts being used in murder investigations... just like these arson experts, they had no scientific proof of anything they concluded. People were still convicted of rape and murder based on their "expert" testimony.

thaumaturgy• 17 years ago

I thought the quote near the beginning of the article about how the death penalty proves the sanctity of life gave a pretty good solution to the "problem" of the death penalty:

Anyone who, either knowingly or negligently, contributes to the execution of any person later found innocent, is guilty of murder punishable by death.

Now, who wants to be the first to help put someone on death row?

adrianwaj2• 17 years ago

"Me and Stacy’s been together for four years, but off and on we get into a fight and split up for a while and I think those babies is what brought us so close together . . . neither one of us . . . could live without them kids."

Did Stacy have jealous boyfriend or secret admirer? She did work at a bar. Murdering Stacy's partner Willingham and their kids could bring them a step closer. Maybe someone was targeting Stacy. Who knows?

The system went for the dad because he was an easy target, and so the system could then move on.

Did Texas execute an innocent man?

Related Stories