Peace & Justice

This is the blog of the Commission on Peace and Justice for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, New York.

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Many Prisoners on Death Row are Wrongfully Convicted

Scientific American magazine reports that researchers estimate that more than 340 U.S. inmates that could have been exonerated were sentenced to death since 1973. According to the magazine:
. . . a team of researchers has concluded that about 4.1 percent of criminal defendants who are sentenced to death are falsely convicted. The approach allows researchers to “actually come up with a valid estimate of the rate of false convictions—knowing something that people say [in criminal justice] is not knowable,” says study author Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan Law School and editor of the National Registry of Exonerations, a U.S.-focused exoneration database. What makes the analysis possible is that data on the potential need for exoneration from death penalty cases come to light more often than it does for other types of criminal proceedings. All death sentences in the U.S. are based on crimes that include homicide.
You can read more here.

This is just one of the reasons why the Catholic Church opposes the death penalty. You can more here.

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