Capital Punishment: Guilty until proven Innocent Most people can agree that a death sentence is the ultimate punishment for those who committed a faulty crime. While death is the most extreme punishment there is, one has to really make sure that the ‘criminal’ is truly guilty of that specific crime. Many factors lead to the death of the innocent, such as weak legal representation, racial discrimination, mistakes in eyewitness testimonies or the “snitch” testimonies, inadequate evidence, or even the community/political pressure to solve the case against the criminal(s). The chances of innocent people getting executed are decreasing by fifty percent since the 1990’s. There has been many cases where the government has made a mistake and either
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Troy was accused of attacking a homeless man by the name of Larry Young and killing a police officer that was off duty, named Mark McPhail, who came to Larry’s defense. Troy Davis was with Sylvester Coles when the scene happened, but in reality Coles was the one who assaulted and killed the police officer and not Troy. The officer was killed by a .38 caliber revolver, and while Coles admitted to carrying a .38 and some other witnesses said that Coles was the shooter, he was never a suspect. Davis was still blamed as the murderer based on minimal physical evidence and testimonies by other witnesses, but the witnesses later admitted that their testimonies were false. The evidence that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found was that there was blood found on his shorts after the murder in Davis’s home, but later found that the blood was nowhere linked to the murder of the police officer. This case raised many petitions and grew attention with public figures, such as President Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI. Troy Davis was later executed on September 21, 2011. This shows how the execution occurred with different testimonies and little evidence to go on, that in the end did not even link to the …show more content…
In the year 2014 of September, North Carolina had the most dramatic exoneration. North Carolina maintained Henry McCollum and his brother Leon Brown in death row for the state’s longest sentence in history. In the year 1983, when Henry McCollum was nineteen years old and Leon Brown was fifteen years old, the police pressured them to sign false confessions, while McCollum and Brown were both intellectually disabled. Henry and Brown went through thirty years of appeal and two trials, in which their guilt went unquestioned, even when there were serious inaccuracies in their confessions. The sentence of Brown was converted to a life without parole, while North Carolina was still looking to execute Henry McCollum. They were freed after the DNA test showed that a rapist and murderer was the true assassin. Henry and Leon could have been executed for something they never committed, showing how capital punishment is a high
Troy was accused of attacking a homeless man by the name of Larry Young and killing a police officer that was off duty, named Mark McPhail, who came to Larry’s defense. Troy Davis was with Sylvester Coles when the scene happened, but in reality Coles was the one who assaulted and killed the police officer and not Troy. The officer was killed by a .38 caliber revolver, and while Coles admitted to carrying a .38 and some other witnesses said that Coles was the shooter, he was never a suspect. Davis was still blamed as the murderer based on minimal physical evidence and testimonies by other witnesses, but the witnesses later admitted that their testimonies were false. The evidence that the Georgia Bureau of Investigation found was that there was blood found on his shorts after the murder in Davis’s home, but later found that the blood was nowhere linked to the murder of the police officer. This case raised many petitions and grew attention with public figures, such as President Jimmy Carter and Pope Benedict XVI. Troy Davis was later executed on September 21, 2011. This shows how the execution occurred with different testimonies and little evidence to go on, that in the end did not even link to the …show more content…
In the year 2014 of September, North Carolina had the most dramatic exoneration. North Carolina maintained Henry McCollum and his brother Leon Brown in death row for the state’s longest sentence in history. In the year 1983, when Henry McCollum was nineteen years old and Leon Brown was fifteen years old, the police pressured them to sign false confessions, while McCollum and Brown were both intellectually disabled. Henry and Brown went through thirty years of appeal and two trials, in which their guilt went unquestioned, even when there were serious inaccuracies in their confessions. The sentence of Brown was converted to a life without parole, while North Carolina was still looking to execute Henry McCollum. They were freed after the DNA test showed that a rapist and murderer was the true assassin. Henry and Leon could have been executed for something they never committed, showing how capital punishment is a high