Most people were guilty, I'm pretty sure. And while I oppose capital punishment, most people in both parties support it.
I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the issue being treated with this sort of enthusiasm inappropriate for such a serious issue.
But saying the prosecution 'tried to frame' them is not quite accurate. Prosecutors are faced with crimes and they like to solve them. They're faced with people with a certain likelihood they are guilty of the crime. Thing is, of the millions of crimes, there are all kinds of innocent people with a lot of evidence making them look guilty.
And once the prosecutor decides for himself there's enough evidence to convict someone, while they're supposed to be 'officers for justice, guilty or not', they basically become machines to try to convict, within the rules. Every bit of evidence, every possible thing they can interpret about the facts, is aimed at conviction. If they're wrong, well, that's the defense lawyer's responsibility to show. They're rewarded for convicting.
The sad fact is, with all the protections in our system (which the right likes to politicize with idiotic slogans like 'care more about the criminal than his victim'), there's often enough evidence to convict innocent people. I don't think prosecutors would almost ever convict people they know are innocent - but they will convict people who there's a chance are, because that's their job, and a whole lot of guilty people have less evidence than that, many of whom go free because of it.
Consider the psychological effect alone: as a prosecutor, you talk to victims all the time, rape, murder, robbery, and have to tell them 'sorry, there's not enough evidence to convict someone for the crime'. Then when there IS enough evidence to convict someone who you honestly think is probably guilty, and the system says 'don't worry, if you prosecute him and the system convicts an innocent person, the blame lies with the defense and jury', and the last thing you want to do is let ANOTHER guilty person go free because he was only 'very probably guilty', you are incented quite a bit to prosecute.
These cases are filled with things like eyewitness testimony that science tells us is highly unreliable, but which everyone involved honestly wants to think is good evidence, including the eyewitness, and that type of evidence is all too effective at trial. Who are you as the juror going to believe, that nice person who has no interest in lying saying they saw the defendant commit the crime, or the defendant who would like to not get convicted?
But we need adults to be concerned about these issues and try to improve them, not demagogues who know they can get elected by cheering executions. Who care far, far more about the possible use of commuting a sentence against them in the next election as an attack, than about the possibility of executing an innocent. Really, why would they EVER commute a sentence or fight for reducing the error rate of convictions, when it only hurts them politically?
And governors in Texas haven't. Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, Texas has commuted only one sentence - of a man for a murder who the Texas officials found the thought could not have committed the murder, with plenty of evidence he was out of state when it happened. In that one case, Bush supported and got the commutation.
In Texas, the governor doesn't have the right to commute a sentence on his own.
There's a board that has to vote whether to recommend doing so, and only if they vote to do so can he then approve it.
This law was put in place because two earlier governors - who were married - were suspected of selling commutations. We've had great governors from Texas.
Funny thing is as well though, the governor in Texas has the least power of any governor in the nation - IIRC, the Lt. Governor really 'runs the state'.
So as bad as the Texas record under Perry is, his claiming credit for it doesn't hold up well at all.
