Why is the death penalty wrongful convictions

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American Journal of Criminal Justice, 20 1 , 37— Sarat, A. He pre-enlisted in the Air Force during high school; after graduating, he served for six years. Having received an honorable discharge, he stayed in Arizona and went to work for the U. Postal Service, a job he planned to keep until retirement.

The day after her body was discovered, Krone was ordered to provide blood, saliva, and hair samples. A dental cast of his teeth also was created. The next day he was arrested and charged with aggravated murder. As was the case with Ajamu, there was no forensic evidence linking Krone to the crime.

DNA was a fairly new science, and none of the saliva or blood collected at the crime scene was tested for DNA. Simpler blood, saliva, and hair tests were inconclusive. He was sentenced to death. I had served my country in uniform. I worked for the post office. This discrepancy in resources available to prosecutors and defendants in capital cases has long been replicated across the nation, leading to predictable outcomes for defendants staked to under-resourced and often ineffective legal counsel.

Krone got a new trial in , when an appeals court ruled that prosecutors had wrongly withheld a videotape of the bite evidence until the day before the trial. Again, he was found guilty. But this time the sentencing judge ruled that a life sentence was appropriate, not death.

They mortgaged their house, and the family hired their own lawyer to look into the physical evidence collected during the original investigation. A man named Kenneth Phillips, who lived less than a mile from the bar where Ancona was killed, had left his DNA on clothes Ancona had been wearing. Phillips was easy to find: He already was in prison for sexually assaulting and choking a seven-year-old girl.

Gary Drinkard was no choirboy. When I spoke with Drinkard, he reminded me of a weather-beaten man straight out of a Merle Haggard song. He wore coveralls and chain-smoked Newports. He spoke slowly and guardedly in a deep southern drawl. He grew exasperated only when I asked him to describe his time on death row. That certainly seemed to be the plan. Drinkard was found guilty in and sentenced to death. He would spend close to six years on death row.

It provided him with legal counsel. 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.

Amos described the gunman as a black man in his twenties, with short dark hair, clean-shaven, wearing black slacks and a white coat.

He was wearing a white jacket and black slacks, and was carrying a black gun with a long barrel. When she blew her horn, the gunman turned to look at her. She heard a pop; Lambert dropped his bag of groceries, and the other man fled. She followed the suspect in her car until her screaming children made her stop. Skillern said that she got a good look at the killer for about a minute and a half through the windshield of her car, which was 20 to 30 feet away from the murder.

Skillern testified that she got a full-face view of Graham and that she was certain he was the person she saw shoot Bobby Lambert. Neither Amos nor Grady was asked during the trial whether Graham was the gunman. Other witnesses were questioned regarding the shooting, though they were unable to identify the killer and their statements were never presented at trial.

Two additional witnesses, Malcolm and Lorna Stephens, who were in their car in the Safeway parking lot, came forward in , long after the trial. Furthermore, Graham was the only suspect in both the photo array and the actual lineup. Defense lawyers argued that Skillern was more likely to choose the person in the lineup who matched the photo that she had already chosen.

Graham also attacked the circumstantial evidence against him. Lambert was killed by a. Though Graham owned a. The jury was not given this information. Graham contended that he had no motive to kill Bobby Lambert, whereas other suspects investigated by the Houston Police Department did. A Houston Police Department report indicated that Lambert had been facing federal drug charges in Oklahoma at the time of the murder and was carrying three shotguns and a number of false identification cards in his van.

Graham claimed that these facts seriously called his guilt into question. In a supplemental petition, he claimed that because he was actually innocent, his execution would be unconstitutional, citing the Supreme Court case of Herrera v. During an evidentiary hearing early in Graham's post-conviction proceedings, a state court found that the alibi witnesses were not credible and their testimony should not be taken into consideration. As a result, Graham was not entitled to relief in state or federal court based simply on the claim that he was innocent.

Anthony Porter came within 50 hours of execution and was exonerated from death row nearly 15 years after he was convicted of two counts of murder.

There was no physical evidence that linked Porter to the shootings, and he was convicted primarily on the basis of eyewitness accounts that placed Porter in the park at the time of the shooting. William Taylor, the prosecution's primary witness, initially claimed that he had not seen the person who committed the shootings at Washington Park. After further questioning, Taylor stated he saw Anthony Porter run by after the shots were fired. After another 17 hours of interrogation, his story evolved further: he ended by saying that he saw the shootings and could identify Anthony Porter as the person who shot the victims.

When the journalism students assigned to Porter's case returned to Washington Park to reenact the crime, they immediately found discrepancies in Taylor's testimony. With the help of a private investigator, the journalism students later confronted Taylor with these discrepancies and Taylor recanted. Taylor explained that the reason for his story about seeing the shootings and his identification of Porter as the shooter was that the police had intimidated him into fingering Porter.

Green told the police that the other victim, Jerry Hillard, had drug ties to Alstory Simon and that she saw the two victims entering Washington Park with Alstory Simon on the evening of the crimes. Years later, Ofra Green signed an affidavit saying that she believed Porter was innocent.

In her affidavit, she wrote, "I told the police about my suspicions.