Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Murders to 148

Hopkins employee saved from stray bullet by Vera Bradley handbag

Suspected kidnapper of the Blackwell boys sent to prison for bullets. Tricia Bishop interviews his victim

MD to test cell-phone jamming in jail

.. how about that Texas, executing an innocent man?

5 comments:

Cham said...

Them Texans do love thar executions. Innocent, guilty, it don't matter.

ppatin said...

Ugh...

Yes, the forensics in the Willingham case were flawed but there is still a very strong case against him. I suggest that you read the rebuttal by one of the prosecutors in that case. Even if Willingham was innocent (very unlikely) he was still a wife-beating piece of crap, so don't feel too sorry for him.

ppatin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
ppatin said...

I would have an easier time taking some of these "an innocent man was executed" stories seriously if the anti-DP movement hadn't discredited itself so many times in the past. Their most famous cause celebre is cop-killer Wesley Cook (better known by his fake name of Mumia Abu-Jamal.) The problem is that despite all the hype surrounding the case, the evidence of Cook's guilt is overwhelming.

After the Cook case the next most famous one was probably Roger Keith Coleman. Coleman was fried in Virginia in 1992, and his execution was followed by more than a decade of hand-wringing by death penalty opponents. Many of them pretended that it was a proven fact that Coleman was innocent, but when DNA testing was done in 2006 using previously unavailable methods it turned out that Coleman was indeed guilty as hell.

Even here in Maryland the anti-DP movement has tried to pretend that Vernon Evans is innocent, despite the fact that he admitted his own guilt in the early 1990s and was convicted by separate federal and state juries. If death penalty opponents want their claims of innocence to be taken a little more seriously they should stop trying to defend murderers who are clearly guilty.

Cham said...

Hey look, our fine city is featured in TIME Magazine, where they answer that age-old question: What is a gang?