Thanks to the Innocence Project and the overturning of 18 wrongful convictions of death-row inmates with DNA evidence and the exonerations of 16 others charged with capital crimes, the American public is increasingly aware that the system makes terrible mistakes.
Eychaner will give away some of that Murdoch moolah to nonprofits like the AIDS Foundation of Chicago and Northwestern's Medill Innocence Project, for which student journalists work to overturn dubious convictions of death-row inmates.
Mr. Ashcroft said at a news conference at the Justice Department that he was now certain that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had found all relevant documents in the case and that none cast doubt on Mr. McVeigh's conviction or the sentence of death he received for the 1995 terrorist attack that killed 168 people and injured scores of others.
Judge William H. Yohn Jr. of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania upheld the conviction but vacated the sentence of death on December 18 , 2001 citing irregularities in the original process of sentencing.
According to a 2005 report by the Northwestern University Center on Wrongful Convictions, of 111 death row exonerations since the 1970s, 51 were men convicted with the help of testimony from "witnesses with an incentive to lie".
As recently as 2006, the Mississippi Supreme Court dismissed the the post-conviction petition of death row inmate Eddie Lee Howard, who was also convicted thanks mostly to bite-mark testimony from West.
A16 Questions on California Juries The convictions of dozens of death-row inmates in California are coming under legal scrutiny because of accusations that Jews and black women were excluded from juries in capital trials in Alameda County as "standard practice".
In the case, the court ruled that the conviction of a death row inmate, Walter Mickens Jr., did not violate the Sixth Amendment's right to counsel even though the lawyer who was appointed to represent Mr. Mickens had previously represented the 17-year-old boy he was charged with killing.
Ms. Montgomery, who has 25 years' experience as a prosecutor and state lawmaker, emphasized that she had "complete confidence" in the state's convictions of those on death row.
I am hopeful that this decision will allow the convictions of those on death row to move forward so that some closure and justice is brought to the families of the victims.
