I know JR already wrote a very good diary about this topic last week, but I just saw the New Yorker story on Google News a bit ago and I felt like I had to de-lurk and write something.
I've been an opponent of the death penalty since my freshman year of college, about 10 years ago. I wouldn't say I was a supporter of it before then, I just hadn't thought much about it. Then I took the obligatory Philosophy 101 (or 1101 where I went) and we had that classic debate, the pros and cons of the death penalty. I don't think I need to repeat all the particulars for this crowd, you're smart enough to either have heard it already or you can go look it up yourself. By the end of that week I had really thought about it for the first time in my life and I came to the inescapable conclusion, the death penalty is wrong.
However, for the most part this realization has been merely intellectual. One of a host of liberal/progressive issue positions to which I subscribe. Every now and again though, you take in some information that makes a real impact, that 'brings the story home' as a journalist might say. This New Yorker story is one of those.
David Grann brings home the humanity, and insanity, and ignorance that combine to make something like the execution of an innocent man possible. It was particularly personal to me because the executed man, Cameron Willingham, reminds me in many ways of my own older brother. Both had troubled childhoods (including run-ins with the law), troubled marriages (though my brother was the victim and his wives the abusers in his case), and both have/had children (two in my brother's case) that they love more than their own lives. There but for the vagaries of Fate could have gone my brother and his children, or any of us and our loved ones.
Pass this story around to your friends, relatives, acquaintances, and even strangers on the street. E-mail them the link, put it in a Facebook or Myspace update. Ask people to read this story and then tell you what they think about the death penalty.
If that doesn't change some minds, nothing will.