DNA Helps Free Inmate After 27 Years

[M A V I C]

Some of you may have caught this whole thing on 60 minutes last night.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/0...5454.shtml

Biggest thing for me out of it was this:

"You had hope?" Pelley asks.

"That’s all a man has," Woodard says. "I had hope for parole. I think I came up about 12 times."

"When you appeared before the parole board what did they say to you?" Pelley asks.

"They always told me, as long as you deny your guilt its saying something about you, you know you are not willing to own up to your deed. And we gonna deny you," Woodard says.

But Woodard refused to admit guilt. "I wasn't guilty," he says.

"You chose truth over freedom," Pelley remarks.

"I mean, a man has to stand for something," Woodard says.

[mattkime]

I wish cases like this presented more of a problem for death penalty advocates.

[davester]

Unfortunately, he's not alone and this is not unusual. I don't know why 60 minutes did a special on just this one case. The Innocence Project http://www.innocenceproject.org/ has freed over 200 convicted felons who they proved were not guilty. Many of them were incarcerated for decades.

[Dennis S]

I forget the numbers, but there are lots of them, just from Dallas County. However, they are one of the few counties in Texas that kept the DNA, so many more people in Texas are out of luck.

[M A V I C]

[quote davester]Unfortunately, he's not alone and this is not unusual. I don't know why 60 minutes did a special on just this one case. The Innocence Project http://www.innocenceproject.org/ has freed over 200 convicted felons who they proved were not guilty. Many of them were incarcerated for decades.
They didn't cover just this one case. The link I posted shows the full article and it discusses other cases and the project (with link to them) as well. The show as all about the project, it just gave specific examples as well.

[jdc]

State District Judge Mark Stoltz set Woodard free. "Unfortunately, Mr. Woodard you're not getting justice today. You're just getting the end of injustice," the judge said.

totally agree, but, sorry, but im still for the DP, regardless of this

[voodoopenguin]

[quote jdc]

totally agree, but, sorry, but im still for the DP, regardless of this
Absolutely, think of the money that could have been saved if these people hadn't been locked up all that time. 2000 volts straight after the trial would have been so much better.

[jdc]

[quote voodoopenguin][quote jdc]

totally agree, but, sorry, but im still for the DP, regardless of this
Absolutely, think of the money that could have been saved if these people hadn't been locked up all that time. 2000 volts straight after the trial would have been so much better.
sorry, but i know you are smart enough to know its not as black and white as that...

[Paul F.]

As A society, we have to accept that NO justice system is perfect.

No matter how hard we try, no matter what safeguards we put in place, the system will make mistakes. Those mistakes will have consequences. Some of those consequences will be that the innocent will be incarcerated, OR executed.
On the flip side of that, we have the guilty being set free all the time.

Do we need to be ever-vigilant? Absolutely.

Should we scrap the U.S. Justice System, or the Death Penalty? No.

Capital Punishment should never be taken lightly, but as a society, EVEN GIVEN THAT THERE WILL BE MISTAKES MADE, I firmly beleive that it is an important option for our justice system to have in some cases.

The idea of accidentally punishing or executing the wrong person is abhorrent to most, and it should be, but if we go TOO FAR in attempting to insure that we "never" punish the wrong person, we will end up punishing NO ONE, and end up even worse off.

[space-time]

when it comes to DP, EU is in the 3rd millennium and US is in the 1st.