Why do innocent people die

A county jury found Drinkard not guilty within one hour, and he was released. There have been more than 2, exonerations overall in the U. In Kirk Bloodsworth was the first person in the nation to be exonerated from death row based on DNA evidence. Bloodsworth was arrested in and charged with raping and murdering Dawn Hamilton, a nine-year-old girl, near Baltimore, Maryland. Police were alerted to Bloodsworth, who had just moved to the area, when an anonymous tipster reported him after seeing a televised police sketch of the suspect.

Bloodsworth bore little resemblance to the suspect in the police sketch. No physical evidence linked him to the crime. Yet Bloodsworth was convicted and sentenced to death based primarily on the testimony of five witnesses, including an eight-year-old and a year-old, who said they could place him near the murder scene.

Witness misidentification is a factor in many wrongful convictions, according to the DPIC. He was granted a second trial nearly two years later, after it was shown on appeal that prosecutors had withheld potentially exculpatory evidence from his defense, namely that police had identified another suspect but failed to pursue that lead.

Again, Bloodsworth was found guilty. A different sentencing judge handed Bloodsworth two life sentences, rather than death. I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life in prison. That book, The Blooding, describes the then emerging science of DNA testing and how law enforcement had first used it to both clear suspects and solve a rape and murder case. When he asked whether DNA evidence could be tested to prove that he was not at the crime scene, he was told the evidence had been destroyed inadvertently.

Prosecutors, sure of their case, agreed to release the items. It would be almost another decade before the actual killer was charged. Today Bloodsworth is the executive director of WTI and a tireless campaigner against capital punishment. Sabrina Butler discovered that Walter, her nine-month-old son, had stopped breathing shortly before midnight on April 11, An year-old single mother, Butler responded with urgent CPR.

When the child could not be revived after several minutes, she raced him to a hospital in Columbus, Mississippi, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Less than 24 hours later she was charged with murder. Walter had serious internal injuries when he died. Butler told police investigators she believed that the injuries were caused by her efforts to revive him. Eleven months later Butler was convicted of murder and sentenced to die. All that I had been told by my attorneys was to sit quietly and look at the jury.

A new trial was ordered. The second trial, with better lawyers, working pro bono, resulted in exoneration. Evidence also was introduced indicating that Walter had a preexisting kidney condition that likely contributed to his sudden death. Butler was released after spending five years in prison, the first half of that on death row. Less than two years after her exoneration, Butler, the first of just two American women ever to be exonerated from death row, received a summons for jury duty.

I explained to him that the state of Mississippi had tried to kill me. I told him I was quite certain that I would not make a good juror. A question that frequently confounds exonerees and the general public alike is whether a consistent formula exists for compensating the falsely convicted, especially those sentenced to die.

The short answer is no. A small number of exonerees have been compensated for millions of dollars depending on the laws of the state that convicted them, but many receive little or nothing.

Few death-row exonerees more closely follow the issue of compensation than Ron Keine, who lives in southeastern Michigan. Growing up in Detroit, Keine ran with a rough crowd. At age 21, he and his closest friend, who both belonged to a notorious motorcycle club, decided to drive a van across the U.

The extended open-road party was going as planned until he and four others were arrested in in Oklahoma and extradited to New Mexico, where they were charged with the murder and mutilation of a year-old college student in Albuquerque. A motel housekeeper reported that the group raped her and that she then saw the group kill the student at the same motel. Blume pointed out another unintended consequence: The ubiquity of innocence programs and publicity of high-profile exonerations seems to have led rising attorneys at major firms to conclude that there are plenty such cases to work on—which makes recruiting lawyers for pro bono work on current capital-defense cases difficult.

In a poll released by Pew this month, 78 percent of Americans said they believe our criminal-justice system risks the execution of innocent people, but 64 percent still said they favor the death penalty in murder cases.

A broadening of focus may do some good, beyond the possibility of innocent inmates on death row to other unjust outcomes.

Examples of the not-quite-so-innocent run the gamut. There are criminal defendants who are guilty of something but not the worst thing they are charged with. There are defendants who are guilty of something other than what they are charged with. There are defendants who committed the crime charged but with significant mitigating or extenuating circumstances. There are defendants who committed the crime, but they had never done anything like this before; they lost control in a trying situation.

There are defendants who committed the crime and it is no wonder, in view of how they came into the world and what they endured after. Blume expressed a little hope—shaded with anxiety. And on the other hand, yes: I do think that some of that obscures the other, larger, systemic issues with the death penalty—the intractable issue of race; the bad, horrific trial-lawyering that persists.

Read: Innocence is irrelevant. Despite receiving this report, the board unanimously voted to move forward with the execution. Willingham died by lethal injection in He requested that his parents not be present. Shortly after, the Innocence Project hired four top fire investigators to do the same thing.

They concluded that every indicator of arson that Fogg and Vasquez relied on had been proven scientifically invalid. In , Texas established a commission to investigate allegations of error in forensic science. Kuykendall was essentially the only surviving member of the family. I miss them so much. On August 19, , Savannah, Georgia, police officer Mark MacPhail intervened in an altercation between two men at a park and was shot twice and killed.

A man named Sylvester Coles was present at the shooting and implicated Troy Davis. Nine other people who were at the park joined Cole in pointing the finger at Davis.

Davis admitted to being at the park. He said that he saw Coles attacking a man but that he left before the shooting took place. No physical evidence connected Davis to the crime, but a jury convicted him and recommended the death penalty based on the nine eyewitness accounts in August In September , the Atlanta Journal-Constitution newspaper published a series of stories in which seven of the nine eyewitnesses recant their testimonies.

Many of them told the newspaper that police pressured them to implicate Davis and that it was actually Coles who shot MacPhail. On July 16, , the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles granted Davis a day stay of execution just one day before he was scheduled to be executed. At his second execution date , the Supreme Court of the United States delayed the execution just two hours before it was scheduled pending its decision to hear the case.

They ultimately decided not to hear the case , and three days before his third execution date, the Georgia Court of Appeals stayed the execution to allow for a new petition. Several failed appeals later, they set a fourth execution date for September 21, Before his execution , he told his sister, Kimberly Davis, that he wanted her to continue fighting to clear his name and end the death penalty. She has committed her life to campaigning around the country to end the death penalty in every state.

Jimmy Dennis spent 25 years on death row for the murder of year-old Chedell Williams. Williams was wearing her favorite pair of gold, figure-eight shaped earrings.

On an October day after school, Williams and her friend, Zahra Howard, were approached by two men as they ascended the stairs at the Fern Rock Bus Station in Philadelphia. The girls ran out of the bus station. Howard heard a gunshot and saw Williams fall to the ground. Neither the gun nor the earrings were ever recovered. Download the pdf. News about Innocence. Urge President Biden to Commute the Federal Death Row Clearing federal death row is the only way to we don't execute an innocent person.

Add Your Name. The Government Wanted to Kill Me Clemente Aguirre fights for justice after spending nearly 15 years on death row for a crime he didn't commit. Read More.