999 Executions, And Counting

CNN.com reports here that the 1,000th execution is scheduled for next week.

Hopefully this news will not knock the Jessica Simpson/Nick Lachey split off the front page.

We've executed one person every 10 days since the moratorium was lifted in 1977.

The 1,000th will be 41 year old Robin Lovitt. He was convicted of stabbing a man with scissors during a pool hall robbery in Virginia.

CNN.com opines that "The focus of the debate on capital punishment was once the question of whether it served as a deterrent to crime. Today, the argument is more on whether the government can be trusted not to execute an innocent person."

Pretty gutsy thing to say for a news organization. Gutsy, meaning "liberal" to many.

In comes Thomas Hill, an attorney for a death row inmate in Ohio who recently won a second stay of execution.

Hill says: "We have a criminal system that makes mistakes. If you accept that proposition, that means you have to be prepared for the inevitability that some are sentenced to death for crimes they didn't commit," Hill said. (Author's note: a post on possibly innocent but executed Ruben Cantu appeared previously on the blog. It can be found here)

Mistakes? Thomas!, you're upsetting the establishment. People don't want to be confused with the facts. We may have, and may again, kill an innocent man.
But again, that's a "liberal" thing to say.

In fact, CNN reports that "advocates of the death penalty argue that its opponents are elitist liberals who are ignoring the real victims."

You're right, an innocent person executed cannot be a victim. They probably did something else anyway......

Caring about or even talking about innocent people being executed is not a staple of the conservative bunch.

Michael Paranzino, president of Throw Away the Key says that "Since 1999, we've had 100,000 innocent people murdered in the U.S., but nobody is planning on commemorating all those people killed."

Who's commemorating anyone?

And speaking about throwing away the key, I don't think anyone on death row who may be innocent is looking for a key- a heartbeat maybe, but not a key.

By the way, since 1973, 122 prisoners have been freed from death row.

Whatever.

Brian Tannebaum is a criminal defense attorney in Miami, Florida practicing in state and federal court. To learn more about Brian and his firm, Tannebaum Weiss, please click the link: http://www.tannebaumweiss.com/our_lawyers.php



BREAKING NEWS - Robin Lovitt's sentence was commuted to life in prison today by Virginia Governor Mark Warner. The story is here