The Arbitrary ChuckJerry

I've said before that I believe in the death penalty in an ideal situation, but that in practice I don't believe it is an effective punishment, nor is it a flawless proposition.

Here is the best example of why I don't believe in the death penalty. The Innocence Project was started in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld at Cardozo Law School, part of Yeshiva University. They review cases for which there is DNA evidence that may or may not overturn convictions. Since they started the project, about 160 cases have been overturned, at least 14 of which involved wrongfully convicted murderers on death row.

Now this project can only get to so many murder cases, but if their small sample has found 14 cases in which murderers were wrongly sentenced to death, then the death penalty system in America is clearly flawed. The fact that at a bare minimum 14 people were wrongfully sentenced to death in this country since 1992 is an enormously telling statistic and should demonstrate that a system that *cannot* be flawed to work effectively is, in fact, flawed.