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August 07, 2005

How many botched death penalty cases make for a broken system?

More than 20 or 30, according to Kent Scheidegger.

Scheidegger is legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-death penalty group. He made comments along that line after Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens criticized the death penalty system in the United States, especially on the number of death-row inmates exonerated in the past few years by DNA testing.

But, that doesn’t mean the system is broken, according to the hard-line Scheidegger:
”I wouldn’t say that 20 or 30 cases out of 8,000 constitutes a broken system.”

(According to the anti-capital punishment Death Penalty Information Center, more than three dozen death row inmates have been exonerated since 2000.)

Wonderful. So just how many wrongly-convicted death-penaltied inmates would make for a broken system? Shouldn’t we be asking that of SCOTUS nominee John Roberts?

After all, if (to riff on Monty Python) every egg-impregnated sperm is sacred, what about adult human beings?

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