Possibility Of Error In The Death Penalty

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Innocent Lives Taken By Death Penalty

keywords View the results at Google, or enable JavaScript to view them here. Fact Sheet Upcoming Executions Execution Database State-by-State Innocence and the Death Penalty: Assessing The Danger of Mistaken Executions Staff Report by the Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights Committee on the Judiciary One Hundred Third Congress, First Session Issued October 21, 1993 Chairman Don Edwards of the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommitte on Civil death row inmates found innocent after execution and Constitutional Rights directed the subcommittee majority staff to prepare this report. This report has not been reviewed or approved by other members of the subcommittee. Prepared with the assistance of the Death Penalty Information Center TABLE OF CONTENTS I. Introduction II. Recent Cases Involving Innocent Persons Sentenced to Death III. Where Did the System Breakdown? IV. Are the Protections in the Legal System Adequate? V. Conclusion  "No matter how careful courts are, the possibility of perjured testimony, mistaken honest testimony, and human error remain all too real. We have no way of judging how many innocent persons have been executed, but we can be certain that there were some." I. INTRODUCTION In 1972, when the Supreme Court ruled in Furman v. Georgia that the death penalty as then applied was arbitrary and capricious and therefore unconstitutional, a mjority of the Justices expected that the adoption of narrowly crafted sentencing procedures would protect against innocent persons being sentenced to death. Yet the promise of Furman has not been fulfilled: innocent persons are still being sentenced to death, and the chances are high that innocent persons have been or will be executed. No issue posed by c

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2014 5:34 PM Big Data Study: 1 in 25 Given Death Penalty Sentence Are Likely Innocent By Elliot Hannon http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2014/04/28/a_new_study_estimates_error_rate_of_death_penalty_sentences_in_u_s.html A view of the death chamber from the witness room at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Photo by Mike Simons/Getty Images A new study published online this week by the National http://www.deathpenaltyindia.com/opinionpieces/the-possibility-of-executing-in-error/ Academy of Sciences takes a shot at determining the rate at which the U.S. mistakenly sentences innocent prisoners to death. The findings are unsettling. The study’s authors conclude that based death penalty on the statistical data, it can safely be estimated that 4.1 percent, or one-in-25 criminal defendants, sentenced to death in the U.S. are innocent. In fact, that’s probably low-balling the actual number of erroneous death penalty sentences. “We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States,” the study’s the death penalty abstract reads. Here’s the problem the study aims to address: The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to death. This makes it possible to use data on death row exonerations to estimate the overall rate of false conviction among death sentences. Advertisement “From 1973 to 2004, 1.6 percent of those sentenced to death in the U.S. — 138 prisoners — were exonerated and released because of innocence,” the Associated Press reports. That number, however, according to the study, likely short changes the actual number of wrongly handed dow

Information Prisoner Information Death Penalty in India Judiciary Executions Opinion External Resources Research Project Research Project Members Project Resources Media The Centre Contact Us Menu HOME DEATH PENALTY INFORMATION Prisoner Information Death Penalty in India Judiciary Executions Opinion External Resources ABOUT US Research Project Members Project Resources media The Centre CONTACT US LOADING... The possibility of executing in error Home Source: Usha Ramanathan and Bezwada Wilson,‘The possibility of executing in error’, The Hindu, December 2, 2014 With tutoring and torture recorded by the magistrate in Surinder Koli’s confession, even if courts have found Koli legally culpable, can we allow the risk of an error? There is a problem with the death penalty that is squarely acknowledged in the law. Section 194 of the Indian Penal Code says: if anyone fabricates false evidence and a person is convicted and given the death sentence as a consequence of such evidence, and is hanged for the offence, then the person who gives such false evidence shall also be punished with death. Here the law recognises the possibility of error that may occur because of fabricated false evidence. In 1989, Parliament imported this provision into Section 3(2) of the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act in 1989. The 1989 law was a reflection of the vulnerability induced by societal and institutional biases, poverty and history of what the Act’s Statement of Objects and Reasons terms “indignities, humiliation and harassment.” The potential for these circumstances of birth and history producing error in the treatment of Dalits and tribals, which could result in a person who is innocent of the offence with which he is charged being executed, is chilling. The National Commission for Scheduled Castes is avowedly “committed to the full implementation” of the Prevention of Atrocities Act, and the President owes a responsibility in ensuring that the castes scheduled in his name are protected. This becomes significant in the Nithari case. Nithari murders The tale of the Nithari murders is one of unimaginable horror. The number of children who largely belonged to migrant workers’ families and who went missing, only to reappear a year or two later, is still unclear. Some say there were 16, some say 18 and others 23. The remains of the children were stashed in the drains running in front of and behind a house in the neighbourhood where they lived. Tales of cannibalism, to