Capital Punishment

Since 1976, when capital punishment was reinstated, eighty-seven men and women have been taken off death row and freed because they were proven innocent. Since the turn of the century, 343 people have been wrongly convicted. Of these, 137 were sentenced to death, twenty-five were actually executed, sixty-one served more than ten years in jail, and seven died while in prison (Rein et al. 77). These figures raise the question: how many innocent people are on death row right now? Recent studies and new evidence suggest that some death row inmates awaiting execution may have been wrongly c…