I must admit to something. I have not developed a solid pro- or anti-death penalty view in my 62 years on this earth. I vacillate between "an eye for an eye" of the Old Testament and "doing unto others" from the New. I hate to see criminals "get away with murder," but I also dislike everything I've ever heard about the death penalty, how it is administered, and how the justice system often fails.
Two recent things have me thinking. The first is a book I just read, The Confession, by John Grisham. In this page turner, a young black man is obviously wrongly accused of rape and sentenced to the death penalty. I will not be a spoiler and tell the entire story, but it is a book that has deeply impacted my thinking. It takes place in Texas and does not paint a very pretty picture of the Texas legal system of the past.
The second is the headline "DNA exonerates another Dallas man." Because of the use of DNA testing and the fact that Dallas did indeed save evidence samples, Cornelius Dupree Jr. is now a free man, having served 30 years for rape and robbery, convicted on scant evidence in 1979. The story goes on to say that there have been 21 DNA exonerations in Dallas County in which all but one were the result of faulty eyewitness identifications. The number in the entire United States is much higher.
I, for one, do not want to play God. The system is incredibly flawed. I cannot imagine spending all of one's youth in prison for a crime I didn't commit.
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