Death Penalty and Fair Trials |
Some people believe that if a person gets a "fair trial" and is convicted, that they deserve to die even though they are innocent. In fact the United States Supreme Court has ruled that way. People think that with all the appeals a prisoner gets that surely justice would be accurate, but that's not the case. The way the system works is, if you are convicted at trial, an appeal is not a new trial. It is mostly only about if the original trial followed certain procedures, not if they came to the correct conclusion. If the process itself is flawed then a reexamination of the flawed process to determine if the flawed process was correctly followed is still flawed.
The bottle line is that the courts are getting it wrong. An example of that is in the state of Illinois, the pro death penalty governor commuted the death sentences of all death row inmates because he determined that at least half of the people who were being executed were in fact innocent. The process of determining guilt is so bad that we are killing a huge number of innocent people. Police often lie about what happens. Torture is often used to get confessions that are used at trial. Governments, including the United States, have allowed convictions to stand based on confessions obtained under torture. Testimony by people claiming the defendant confessed are obtained through bribes. Prosecutors often fabricate evidence to convict people when the evidence is insufficient. Fraud is more common than rare, and people are being killed by the state as a result.
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