How can anyone support the death penalty after a story like this one?

[Nye Bevan]

LUMBERTON, N.C. — Thirty years after their convictions in the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl in rural North Carolina, based on confessions that they quickly repudiated and said were coerced, two mentally disabled half-brothers were declared innocent and released Tuesday by a Robeson County court.

The case against the men, always weak, fell apart after DNA evidence implicated another man with a history of rape and murder.

The startling shift in fortunes for the men, Henry Lee McCollum, now 50, who has spent three decades on death row, and Leon Brown, 46, who was serving a life sentence, provided one of the most dramatic examples yet of the potential for false, coerced confessions and also of the power of DNA tests to exonerate the innocent.

As friends and relatives of the two men wept, a superior court judge, Douglas B. Sasser, said he was vacating their convictions and ordering their release.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/us/2-convicted-in-1983-north-carolina-murder-freed-after-dna-tests.html

There will always be mistakes and prosecutorial misconduct. But at these guys will be released, and hopefully get paid compensation and have a few good decades of life. I wonder if they had been executed if we would have ever even found out that they are innocent.

[brer cat]

1. Thirty years!

No amount of money can compensate for that. I hope they can live peaceful and tranquil lives now.

[Journeyman]

2. Why confine ourselves to the innocent? Here's a highly disturbing tale of guilt . . .

I give you Robert Pierce, late of San Quentin (1956).

Here's Evan S. Connell to explain:

Robert Pierce, awaiting execution at San Quentin prison,
contrived to slash his throat with a shard of glass,
precipitating a frantic quarrel among the authorities:
some insisted that he be executed before he bled to death
while others thought he should be taken to the hospital.
Presently, with gouts of blood bubbling from his neck,
he was carried into the gas chamber. Witnesses screamed,
vomited and several fainted. The decision had been reached,
officials later explained, because at the time of death
the prisoner probably would still be alive and therefore
conscious not only of his crime but of the retributions
justly demanded by the Sovereign State of California.

Evan S. Connell, Points for a Compass Rose, 1973

Pierce was a contemporary of Caryl Chessman. They shared the Row together, but not a cell, and not even near each other, as Pierce was deemed too dangerous to be kept with the other condemned prisoners; they kept him penned in a special section dubbed the "Iron Curtain."

Ah, but he's dead, and that's what the State demanded (no matter the sacrifice to our morals or beliefs).

[Nye Bevan]

3. Perfect example of "be careful when you fight the monsters....

.... lest you become one".

- Nietzsche

[Journeyman]

4. Very apt. I'll remember that. . .