Death Row

Seventy-five men and women have been freed from what was to be their wrongful death because a further investigation into their case proved them to be innocent. Since 1977 when the U.S. Supreme Court reenacted the law to enforce the death penalty, 486 prisoners have been executed. At the time that John McCormick wrote his Newsweek article titled “The Wrongly Condemned” in which he exposed the faults and flaws of the justice system, 3,517 inmates lay on death-row. If The Swift Justice Measure bill was passed by the state assembly, all capital offense cases would be put in fast-track to execution. The amount of time taken during the trial, sentencing, appeals, and execution would be fast-forwarded, hardly leaving enough time to even look at the case. On average, the seventy-five inmates spent seven years on death-row before being able to prove their innocence. Those seven years were spent reviewing the whole entire case until they were able to prove with absolute certainty that they were not guilty. Currently, a prisoner will spend ten or more years on death-row before their execution, during which time developments in technology and the individuals case are made which would further prove their possible innocence or guilt.

The development of technology has really assisted the gathering and analyzing of evidence. The ability to test DNA has been the proving fact in many cases, whether proving innocence or guilt. DNA testing led to the release of Dennis Williams and Verneal Jimerson along with two other men who were believed to have raped and murdered a young couple. Without DNA testing, four innocent men would have died, and the arrest of three men who admitted to the crime would never have been made. If the time that men like Dennis and Verneal spent on death-row was reduced, they might have been killed before DNA testing was invented. Although, according to McCormick's article, “very few murderers leave their semen or blood at a crime scene. Of the seventy-five cases that were lifted, only about ten involved DNA evidence.” No matter what the success rate from DNA testing, according to Lawrence Marshall, “DNA improves our detection rate. It opens our eyes to how many other convictions may be wrong.”

Corruption in the court system also comes into play when making convictions. Racism led to the arrest of Clarence Bradley. Suppression of key evidence by the prosecution proving Bradley's innocence then led to his wrongful conviction. After living the burden of someone else's life on death-row for ten years,