Richard C. Dieter Quotes
Judging by past experience, a substantial number of death row inmates are indeed innocent and there is a high risk that some of them will be executed. Once an execution occurs, the error is final.
Richard C. Dieter, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center, Don Edwards, U. S. Congressman (Democrat, CA), Innocence and the Death Penalty: Assessing the Danger of Mistaken Executions, Edwards issued this report as the Chairman of the Joint House and Senate Committee on Civil and Constitutional Rights, Innocence and the Death Penalty: Assessing the Danger of Mistaken Executions, 1993
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He was referring to exonerations for capital crimes like murder. He had written a book about a case where a man who was later proved innocent was reprieved only 5 days before his execution.
More and more evidence had been mounting that innocent men had been mistakenly sentenced to death throughout the country and Texas executed more people than any other state.
He was describing a real case in Canada. There as well as the United State, for those who oppose capital punishment give as their main reason the mistakes made by the criminal justice system, and the innocent people who have been executed.
Texas executes more people than the rest of the United States does. However, just before the debate an investigation disclosed 56 recent cases in Texas where the “criminals” were completely exonerated based on the work of some volunteer attorneys and law students. They were all released from jail where many had served decades for crimes they did not commit. 5 were released from Death Row—awaiting to be executed. See {635339}.
This is one of the sharpest dissents in Supreme Court history. Rarely to justices write opinions accusing other justices of a gross immorality or crime. The majority held that the Supreme Court should not grant a new trial simply because there was some evidence discovered showing him innocent. See {635412} for a quotation from the majority opinion.
The implication of this sura is that it is permissible to kill non-Muslims but not Muslims. The same is true of slavery. Another prescription of this sura is that a Muslim should never kill another Muslim, so while this sura is very discriminatory and in that sense reprehensible, it does call into question the Islamic terrorist practice of the late 20th and early 21st century of killing fellow Muslims who might vote, serve in an official role or cooperate with non-believers. And it definitely to the Western mind prohibits the kind of Islamic sectarian violent practice of Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims torturing and butchering each other—a practice that has continued since the two groups fought over who was the rightful successor to Muhammad. The religious rationale for that murderous behavior is that each Islamic group sees the other as apostate and therefore no longer real Muslims.
Einstein had changed his mind. He like almost everyone else at the time favored the death penalty, but in 1927 came to the new conclusion for the same reasons that many American politicians stated 70 years later. He had no compunctions against capital punishment for murderers who were dangers to society, but the potential error of the justice system led him to oppose state sanctioned execution. At the time the number of errors in capital cases that had been demonstrated were few. But as a scientist, Einstein knew that all human endeavors were prone to error. He was a strong law and order supporter however—see {588606}.
Mistakes in the criminal justice system have been with us from the birth of the nation.
Richard C. Dieter is an attorney and native of New York City. He received his undergraduate degree in mathematics from the University of Notre Dame and a masters degree from the Ohio State University. He graduated cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC. At Georgetown, he was one of the University's first Public Interest Law Scholars and served as an editor of the Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics. He is a member of the Maryland Bar, the Bar of the District of Columbia, and the Bar of the U. S. Supreme Court, and serves as an Adjunct Professor at the Catholic University School of Law, where he teaches a seminar on the death penalty.
