Wrongful execution
Opponents of capital punishment often cite cases of wrongful execution as arguments, while proponents argue that innocence concerns the credibility of the justice system as a whole and does not solely undermine the use of the death penalty.
At least 190 people who were sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated and released since 1973, with official misconduct and perjury/false accusation the leading causes of their wrongful convictions.
The case was re-examined in the 1990s using modern techniques and Ross was eventually pardoned in 2008, by which time capital punishment in Australia had been abolished in all jurisdictions.
In 2005, ten years after the execution, Wang Shujin (王书金; Wáng Shūjīn) admitted to the police that he had committed the murder.
On 5 December 2006, ten years after the execution, Zhao Zhihong (Chinese: 赵志红) wrote the Petition of my Death Penalty admitting he had committed the crime.
On 28 January 2011, over 13 years after the execution, Hsu Jung-chou (許榮洲), who had a history of sexual abuse, admitted to the prosecutor that he had been responsible for the crime.
[19][20] Statistics likely understate the actual problem of wrongful convictions because once an execution has occurred there is often insufficient motivation and finance to keep a case open, and it becomes unlikely at that point that the miscarriage of justice will ever be exposed.
[23] In 1920, two Italian immigrants, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were controversially accused of robbery and murder in Braintree, Massachusetts.
As details of the trial and the men's suspected innocence became known, sporadic protests were held in major cities all around the world calling for their release, especially after Portuguese migrant Celestino Madeiros confessed in 1925 to committing the crime absolving them of participation.
[24] However, the Supreme Court refused to upset the verdict, and in spite of worldwide protests, Sacco and Vanzetti were eventually executed in 1927.
[25][26] On 23 August 1977, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis issued a proclamation vindicating Sacco and Vanzetti, stating that they had been treated unjustly and that "any disgrace should be forever removed from their names".
[28][29][30] In October 1930, a 16-year-old black teenager named Alexander McClay Williams was accused of murdering Vida Robare, a white matron of his reform school, during an attempted sexual assault.
Lemon posited that Williams's wrongful prosecution stemmed largely from his race and the "racially charged" atmosphere present at the time.
[35] Joe Arridy (1915–1939) was a mentally disabled white American man executed for rape and murder and posthumously granted a pardon.
In March 2004 cold-case DNA testing identified Leoncio Rueda as the rapist and murderer of another elderly victim killed four months earlier.
Beyler said that key testimony from a fire marshal at Willingham's trial was "hardly consistent with a scientific mind-set and is more characteristic of mystics or psychics".
Later it was found that the girl had been murdered by Andrei Chikatilo, a serial killer nicknamed "the Red Ripper" and "the Butcher of Rostov", who was executed in 1994.
After Ancona had told a friend that Krone, a regular customer, was going to help her close the bar the previous night, the police brought him in to make a Styrofoam impression of his teeth.
At the trial in 1992, Krone pled innocence, but the teeth mark comparison led the jury to find him guilty and he was sentenced to death as well as a consecutive twenty-one year term of imprisonment.
[61] DPIC reported in February 2021 that exonerated death-row prisoners had been wrongly convicted and sentenced to death in 29 different states and in 118 different counties.
Underscoring the often intentional nature of wrongful capital convictions, more than half of all exonerations involved both official misconduct and perjury or false accusation, and at least one or the other was present in nearly 83% of the cases.
Following his execution, efforts were made to clear his name, and in the 1990s old evidence was re-examined with modern forensic techniques which supported the view that Ross was innocent.
In 2006 an appeal for mercy was made to Victoria's Chief Justice and on 27 May 2008 the Victorian government pardoned Ross in what is believed to be an Australian legal first.
In 1986, in Ford v. Wainwright, the US Supreme Court ruled that it is unconstitutional to execute a person who does not understand the reason for or the reality of his or her punishment.
[66] In 2019, in the case of Alabama death-row prisoner Vernon Madison, the Court again addressed the proper standard for determining competency to be executed.
Madison had cognitive dementia resulting from a series of strokes that, his lawyers said, left him without a rational understanding of why Alabama intended to execute him.
Following the ruling, sixteen states as well as the federal government passed legislation that banned the execution of offenders with mental retardation.
By a vote of 6-3, the Court held that the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment applied to those with intellectual disability.
The Court referred to the clinical definitions of the disorder in use by the medical community but ultimately left to the states the determination of who qualified as intellectually disabled.
[67] In 2014, the Supreme Court ruled in Hall v. Florida that states cannot apply an IQ cut-off score of 70 to arbitrarily limit which individuals qualify as intellectually disabled.
