Backtracking on the death penalty

The New York Time's article by Adam Liptak, Shapers of Death Penalty Give Up on Their Work offers hope to me that death penalty proponents are losing serious ground. If this group, described as "the only intellectually respectable support for the death penalty system in the United States," recognizes that the system is broken, then perhaps we are on the way to taking the death penalty off the judicial table.

One of their findings was that the system is plagued by racial disparities. Finally.

For too many years, people have tried to justify the death penalty system, arguing that the appeals process has insured that no innocent persons have ever been executed. Riiiiiight...

Here where I live, Forsyth County, North Carolina, there have been two men proven innocent after years of imprisonment. Had they been on death row, who knows if there would have been time to jump through the hoops necessary to prove their innocence. And despite the incredible odds against there being two convictions overturned, there is a third man here who is probably innocent as well, Kalvin Michael Smith. All three men are African American.

I tried to link to the Winston-Salem Journal's latest story on Smith, but could not get the link to work. Search their site for the story: http://www2.journalnow.com/home/

As this institute is finally willing to acknowledge, the death penalty system is broken. Based on what I have seen in the three cases above, our judicial system is broken. Until we are willing to face the racial biases that pervade the system, more innocent people will be convicted while dangerous perpetrators walk the streets.