DNA exonerations prove innocent people have been sentenced to death
Evidence
In his dispute with Justice Blackmun on the justness of capital punishment, Justice Scalia cited a murder committed 30 years earlier: “For example, the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared to that!” (Mazza, 2014). Two brothers of low intelligence were sentenced to death for this crime on the basis of a coerced, fake confession that they later retracted, rather than on physical evidence linking them to the crime. Justice Scalia used this case as an example of the justness and comparative benignness of the death penalty. In an ironic twist, the same case later became an example of judicial injustice. After 30 years of imprisonment, the brothers were exonerated by DNA evidence from the crime scene that linked the murder to a sex offender imprisoned later for another rape (Mazza, 2014). Periodic DNA exonerations indicate that there are other innocents on death row. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2077
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether any capital case used as a Scalia-style exemplar of just punishment has since been overturned.
Related
- Judges cite vivid but false crime narratives to justify executions (similarity 0.86)
- DNA exonerations eroded public support for capital punishment. (similarity 0.83)
- Since 1973, 185 wrongfully convicted people were exonerated from death row (similarity 0.82)
- DNA exonerations eroded majority death-penalty support after 1994 (similarity 0.79)