I don’t disagree with you AK84, but I still suspect where capital punishment has happened, unless it has happened in a place like the USA, the records are not going to be brilliant. (I would add I have no knowledge of your statutes in Pakistan).
If there was a reported executionnin the Congo, i would have less faith in the system than in the UK. (where it doesn’t happen anymore anyway).
However, to revert to the OP, I simply can’t think of a case where a person was executed and later found to not be the villian. Maybe doubt, but no clear evidence.
I hadn’t heard about the DNA tests. I watched some show on the Hitler Channel where supposedly Churchill received a note from the wife and pocketed it so the execution would go ahead.
So the sample might have been male, or it might have been contaminated sometime in the past hundred years. The techniques used are ‘special’, and may or may not be accurate since they have not been vetted by repeated use by numerous scientists. The pyjama top might have been planted, or it might not have been. Cora might have been living in the U.S., or it could be someone with the same name and age who is completely unrelated.
There are people who have ‘evidence’ that Man never walked on the Moon, and that the Pentagon was damaged by a cruise missile. Examined objectively, we can see that the claims are false. But people often tailor evidence to prove their own hypotheses. Was Crippen innocent? Maybe. But I’d like to see more than one investigation, and to see evidence that the specimens are not contaminated and some sort of evidence of evidence-tampering.
You suspect wrong (although you are not alone). Records are quite voluminous (and have been the downfall of many regimes). What differentiates the UK and the Congo is not the records but their content, in the UK its pretty easy to get a DNA test done not the case in the Congo (or most of Africa actually) or get forensics , not that they do not exists, but the access to them is difficult and the penetration is not sufficient to give all cases the optimum amount. Also, in the developing world, forensics have a far greater role in catching the guilty then exonerating the innocent. Remember far many more people get away with crimes than those punished for crimes they did not commit.
And yet they say that it is perfect, or don’t care. If you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, you can’t have an execution without killing someone.
I’m not sure he was legally innocent. Morally innocent, sure. But I do think there were grounds that he was a revolutionary. I mean, he started a big riot less than a week before. Being non-violent wouldn’t make him not guilty.
In a case in Quebec, some American hunters were killed in the 1950`s. The general consensus is that person exeuted for their murder was convicted in a hurry on flimsy evidence in order to close the case so American tourists would not be scared off.
The most notorious case was 1959, Stephen Truscott, almost executed. He gave a friend a ride out to the highway on his bicycle because she was running away from home. She was later found strangled. Based again on flimsy evidence, he was railroaded and sentenced to death. Fortunately for him, the sentence was commuted. He was 14, she was 12 at the time.
The justice system refuses to admit it has made a mistake and has to be dragged kicking and screaming to that conclusion. The Supremem court reviewed the evidence and upheld the conviction, but the guy was eventually release on parole under an assumed name and has been a model citizen ever since.
Based on these and other cases, the death penalty had a very bad reputation in Canada and the government automatically commuted all sentences starting in the 1960`s, well before it was formally abolished.
Despite what we see on detective shows, police are rarely motivated to find the truth. The pressure is to close the case. Same for the justice system. I recall one case where it came to light the police had eventually charged 3 people for a 2-person crime. Many criminals are not the brightest, and under intense questioning one fellow confessed to a crime and was convicted. A year later, when the real culprits were caught and confessed, they too were convicted. Nobody told the first guy or his lawyer.
My concern with the current US system is this - often, the prosecutor is quick to offer a deal. So, the first person to sing gets life instead of death, and blames his accomplice(s) for the deaths. The controversy is not ìs this person totally innocent?, but ìs the sadistic trigger man escaping the death penalty and blaming the death on his accomplices? Is justice truly being served?
Even if a jury does their job perfectly, they can only evaluate the evidence they have in front of them. If the jury is right 99% of the time that means that over 100 innocent people will be convicted of murder every year.
If you raise the standard from reasonable doubt to ontological certainty, then you can’t convict anybody of anything.
Also keep in mind that very few murders are actually executed, so locking up an innocent person for the rest of their life is the same penalty they would usually get if they were guilty. My view is that locking someone in a cage for the rest of their life isn’t actually a lesser punishment than execution.
When you have make real decisions in the real world, you have to deal with the possibility of error, even fatal errors. Only fools think such things can be totally avoided.
For a start, those people who spend their time searching for evidence of wrongful conviction, they concentrate on the living. They have saved the lives of many wrongly convicted innocents. Trying to prove the innocence of an already dead person takes rather low priority.
And if they did have absolute proof, what good would it do? most of the pro-death people would just say “so what?” Very few minds would be changed by such a thing.
And that movie was one of the most ridiculous things ever committed to celluloid. Do you really think it is an accurate representation of the activities of the anti-DP people?
I would like a cite from your vast police experience. In all my years of police work and being a detective I can say that there has never been a pressure to close the case regardless of the truth. The absolute worst thing that could happen personally and professionally is to lock away the wrong person. Sometimes there is pressure to close a case (never murder) because there is not enough evidence to arrest anyone and it’s time to move on to other cases. There has never been pressure to just make an arrest regardless of the truth. Try not to pull things out of your ass when answering questions here.
“Knowing somebody is innocent after the fact” does not equal “legally exonerated”. We can be in agreement that those executed during the witch trials were innocent of charges…but neither of us have the authority to find them legally innocent.