At 10pm tonight, BBC4 will show A Death Row Tale: The Fear of 13, a 90-minute long documentary. The description in my TV guide:
After more than two decades on Death Row, Nick Yarris asked for all appeals to stop, and for his death sentence to be carried out. Then, the DNA testing that he had been requesting for years exonerated him. In a simple new film – composed largely of Yarris talking to the camera – he tells his terrible, but ultimately uplifting story.
‘Ultimately uplifting story’? The man spent over two decades on Death Row because the state wouldn’t fund a $100 DNA test. How many more such miscarriages of justice exist around the world? It must surely be a huge number, and the overwhelming majority of victims are men.
Justice for Men & Boys 
The USA is a strange place, effectively sentencing capital criminals twice: once to a period of imprisonment longer than most life sentences in Europe and then to death. I have to say that I have no moral or philosophical objection to the death penalty but oppose it vehemently simply because of the risk of a miscarriage of justice. By coincidence, I’ve just read the Wikipaedia entry for John Bellingham, the man who assassinated Spencer Percival. He was tried and executed within seven days of the Murder. No languishing for twenty plus years then.
Albert Pierrepoint used to assert that he’d never hanged an innocent man and, legally, he was correct, since everyone of his ‘clients’ had been tried and convicted, however, he hanged hundreds, including Timothy Evans, who was an innocent man.
It’s interesting that the psychological effects of prolonged imprisonment can drive an innocent man to press for his own execution.
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Quite apart from any issues around the morality of taking life or the unsoundness of human ‘justice’, there is third objection to the whole Death Row obscenity.
That is, even IF guilty they have been punished twice.
Once by being banged up for twenty years in pointless uselessness, then twice by being killed – sometimes incompetently.
And why?
Money is being made out of it, that’s why.
Humans in general will do ANYTHING for money, that concept I am of course familiar with, being now somewhat over 21. But it seems to me that Americans are particularly
prone to this abysmaly foul foible.
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I think I said that.
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Think of punishments as a pyramid with a parking ticket fine at the bottom and execution at the apex. Below the apex there is life in prison, very long incarceration, medium length, short length, etc. Hundreds, if not thousands, of men have been exonerated from death row or life sentences – the apex punishments. If the system is so flawed it allowed these miscarriages to occur, just imagine the scale of the number of miscarriages that occur lower down the punishment pyramid. This is statistical proof that the system does not care about truth, fact, or the concept of justice. It only cares about generating business for itself and closing a case in any way necessary. Cops and prosecutors lie with impunity. If perjury was punished, the system would collapse. Anyone who supports this system is either feeding off it or woefully naive. I speak from personal experience.
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I agree John, good points very well made.
Which pretty much prove my assertion that money and power are the two sides of one coin and sadly, the most important things there are.
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‘Justice’ is a game won by the player scoring more points than his opponent, and truth has nothing to do with the outcome.
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Good observation!
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