Wrong man executed in Texas

This is an investigation from the Chicago Tribune, the same paper that proved through their investigations that innocent people were on death row in Illinois. This lead to the death penalty moretorium in IL.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/broadband/chi-tx-htmlstory,1,781241.htmlstory?coll=chi-news-hed

in which a guy was innocent but was put to death anyway because the prosecutor refused to allow any new evidence to be presented.

She told me about it and that I'd like the episode, and actually told me she finally understood why I had such a problem with the death penalty. My issue has never been that I don't believe some people should be permanently kicked off the island, so to speak, but that the system runs roughshod over innocent people and I don't trust the system to protect them.

I'm against the death penalty, but in my experience there are definitely people who deserve to die...
(some in very long and painful ways)

I just don't believe the state is competent to determine who those people are.

and is therefore invalid. IMO.

yes

www.chicagotribune.com is a registration-only site, so I'm following up here with a few paragraphs from the article. This is the first of a three-part series.

`I didn't do it. But I know who did'
New evidence suggests a 1989 execution in Texas was a case of mistaken identity. First of three parts.

By Maurice Possley and Steve Mills
Tribune staff reporters
Published June 24, 2006

For many years, few questioned whether Carlos De Luna deserved to die.

His execution closed the book on the fatal stabbing of Wanda Lopez, a single mother and gas station clerk whose final, desperate screams were captured on a 911 tape.

Arrested just blocks from the bloody crime scene, De Luna was swiftly convicted and sentenced to death--even though the parolee proclaimed his innocence and identified another man as the killer.

But 16 years after De Luna died by lethal injection, the Tribune has uncovered evidence strongly suggesting that the acquaintance he named, Carlos Hernandez, was the one who killed Lopez in 1983.

Ending years of silence, Hernandez's relatives and friends recounted how the violent felon repeatedly bragged that De Luna went to Death Row for a murder Hernandez committed.

Continued at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/chi-tx-1-story,0,4563517.htmlstory

no big deal.

:sarcasm:

:sarcasm:

God, this makes me sick to my stomach.

They have SC authority that it's ok to go ahead and execute someone even if they have EVIDENCE that the person is innocent.

In 1993 in Cantu, (Ruben Cantu was executed in a murder case despite serious doubts that he had committed the offense. His co-defendant, who got life, has spoken out plenty about how he and another person really did the murder) the Supreme Court wrote that actual innocence is not a constitutional bar to execution; the 1996 law says that the case cannot be relitigated in federal courts.


(emphasis mine)

not be executed.

it calls into question the whole notion of ''closure'' and justice.

the state should not be executing anyone.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/case/cases/

TRANSCRIPTS:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/case/etc/script.html

...when you allow lawyers to be put in charge of a human life. I wouldn't trust a roomful of lawyers with the life of my daughter's goldfish.

No offense to you lawyers here at DU, but it's the 99% of the lawyers that give you all a bad name.