An editorial in Saturday’s Washington Post celebrates the continuing decline in sanctioned executions across the country in 2011 and explores reasons for the drop, including fear of executing an innocent person, reduced crime rate, difficulty obtaining the drugs used in executions and more. Similarly, judges and juries have shown a greater reticence to impose death sentences.
There can be no denying that the criminal justice system makes mistakes. Seventeen people sentenced to die in the United States have been exonerated by DNA evidence, after serving a combined 209 years in prison, according to the Innocence Project. Hundreds more subject to non-capital sentences have also been freed as a result of DNA testing. For many convicts proclaiming innocence, there isn’t and will never be DNA evidence to provide certainty.
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