The question I always ask people when they tell me they support the death penalty is "How many innocent people are you willing to murder in order to have your desire for vengeance satisfied?"
As you can imagine, I get howls of protest about this question, mostly with the individual questioned claiming that an innocent person has never been executed.
Well, now it has been proven unequivocally that this is not true.
And where did this wrongful execution take place?
Where else, but Texas:
He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.
Even "all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them," and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.
Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is "emblematic" of legal system failure.
DeLuna, 27, was put to death after "a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure," Liebman said.
This is why you never trust eyewitnesses. In this case, the guys did look alike, but a tiny bit of real investigation would have turned up the error and the real killer.
The police, however, were busy covering their own negligence.
That night Lopez called police for help twice to protect her from an individual with a switchblade.
"They could have saved her, they said 'we made this arrest immediately' to overcome the embarrassment," Liebman said.
The story lays it out. Contradictory evidence, official misconduct, incompetent representation, and even the real killer confessing to the crime.
There are so many rhetorical questions I could ask at this point, so I will skip it and just say:
Executions.Must.Stop.