VADP

The headline of the article (see link below) from The New York Times,
"Consensus on Counting the Innocent: We Can't" sums up the
fruitlessness of such an exercise. The story raises the obvious
question, one that still has not adequately penetrated the American
consciousness: since we clearly cannot accurately determine the number
of innocent people who are being convicted -- including those
sentenced to death -- how can the death penalty possibly be justified?

Justice Scalia and Joshua Marquis make their usual, tired arguments:
the number of "authentic" death row exonerations is around 30; the
reversal of wrongful convictions demonstrate that the system works,
etc. The notion that an exoneration is not "authentic" because as
Marquis says, the defendant "committed the crime but could not be
proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" is an outrageous and
preposterous claim, given the supposed standards of our criminal
justice system. Yet DAs and other death penalty supporters continue
to get away with such claims, in part because terms such as "actual
innocence" and "factual innocence" have made their way into the
vocabulary.

It's disturbing that Scalia's and Marquis' specious arguments occupy
such a prominent place in the newspaper of record. Pro-death penalty
people who, in desperation, attempt to undermine the standard of
"guilty beyond a reasonable doubt" need to be consistently challenged
and held accountable for their indefensible position on innocence.

Kurt Rosenberg
Director, Witness to Innocence

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/25/us/25bar.html?ex=1364184000&en=

29ab8b765f0b37e0&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink