No. of Recommendations: 7
I was baptised and raised Catholic. My conscience also would bother me if I ordered the execution of an innocent person. That's not 'conscience' based in RC dogma. It's based in the knowledge that there's prosecutorial malfeasance causing wrongful verdicts.
Some are due to malfeasance, not all, we have advances in forensic science too. In the case of Todd Willingham he was put to death on the basis of old wive's tails passed down from one generation of firefighters to another. A forensic scientist ran experiments on the evidence that convicted Todd, and none of it was true, it was all rubbish. So he bundled it up and sent it to the committee reviewing Todd's case and they didn't even look at it. They said by that point all they are doing is crossing all the Ts and dotting all the Is, not reviewing things to exonerate someone.
So they had to take a good look at what they were doing - and it took time to break down the barriers to reviewing what they were doing. The state didn't want to admit they put an innocent man to death and they had a chance not to and because of their attitudes didn't review it. They had evidence he was innocent in their hands.
That's the way we are.
In my case I was trying to put together a relatively foolproof review so that we could execute people with confidence, and I had to admit we couldn't due to prosecutorial misconduct. How would we know that there are witnesses that stated he was never there that the prosecution withheld? How would we know that there were people who corroborated his alibi that were not interviewed? Most of what the innocence projects exonerations are based on DNA that the convicted persons blood doesn't match the DNA of the perpetrator at the scene. But it amazed me that prosecutors would risk their legal license to get a conviction. Watch the papers - it happens more often than I cared to think it would.
