I said nothing about that so you are making a completely unfounded and incorrect assumption. In my opinion people who would otherwise be given the death penalty should be put in prison for life, without parole. And prison systems should be upgraded so that these inmates cannot harm the prison staff. Our justice system being what it is, it will continue to sentence innocent people to this fate. However if they are not killed they at least have some kind of life and they retain the possibility of being exonerated, and compensated, at some point. You can do that for the living innocents, you cannot do that for the ones you have executed. Make no mistake about it, I want violent criminals removed from our society until it can be shown that they have truly reformed or are dead. I don't have any qualms about "warehousing" violent offenders who continue to present a danger to society. Releasing them so they can kill, ****, or mutilate another victim is as bad as executing an innocent person. It must not happen, yet currently it commonly does.

I think that DNA testing probably has reduced the incidence of convictions of innocents in capital (and other) crimes. DNA is not available in every case though so I am sure that the same old police tactics that convicted innocents in the past continue to do so today. In fact I happened to catch a TV report last weekend on the "science" behind arson investigations. As it turns out there is none. Many of the signs of arson that investigators have used for decades to accuse, convict, and in many cases execute people for arson crimes have been shown by scientific investigations to be false. They occur naturally in a high percentage of building fires. People have literally been executed based on what amounts to old wife's tales and continue to be to this day. The report included coverage of a woman who was accused of murdering her children by arson and who was facing the death penalty. The situation is a lot like the Salem witch trials, modern style.

How many more practices like this are deeply embedded in our police and criminal justice system? People generally try to do the best they can though there are horrific exceptions among our police, judges, etc too. Humans are unable to live up to our own high standards of justice and fairness even when they try with all their might however. Killing innocent people for crimes they never committed and in some cases which were not committed at all is unacceptable to me. Releasing violent criminals into society so they can rinse and repeat is just as unacceptable. I say let's do neither. Warehouse them all and release the ones that can later be shown to be innocent.

Ken