The End of an Innocent

Death penalty opponents often point to the growing number of people freed from death row as evidence of the fact that the system is fatally flawed. Supporters frequently fire back that death row exonerations are actually a sign that the system does work and that no innocent person has ever been wrongly executed, at least since executions restarted in the 1970s. I've always been dubious of that claim - if hundreds of people have been wrongly convicted and managed to hold on long enough to be exonerated, surely someone has gone to their death for a crime they did not commit.

Well, the Houston Chronicle has found one. Ruben Cantu was convicted in a shooting that left one mad dead and another seriously wounded in 1984. He was executed in 1993, constantly protesting his innocence. In two stories that ran earlier this week, the Chronicle shows how Cantu was almost certainly innocent. The only eyewitness to the crime (the second victim) has recanted, and Cantu's alleged codefendant recently revealed that Cantu wasn't involved in the shooting at all. The codefendant escaped execution by pleading guilty and testifying against Cantu at trial. In other words, the guy who actually did it snitched on an innocent man and sent him to his death.

There are many reasons to scrap the death penalty completely on moral, ethical, and policy grounds. But first and foremost, shouldn't we be sure that we actually get it right when someone pays the ultimate penalty? If we can't even assure that the right people get executed, it makes a mockery of the entire justice system.