This resembles the itsy-bitsy contrition of Jim Ryan, the Republican front-runner, who says he's "sorry" for crucial involvement as a prosecutor in the notorious wrongful-death convictions of two men in the 1983 kidnapping, rape and murder of a Naperville girl, Jeanine Nicarico.
It showed that two-thirds of death convictions or sentences were upset on appeal for such reasons as incompetent defense lawyers or prosecutors who bent the rules.
From the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1973 to the end of 1995, there were a total of 5,760 death penalty convictions, of which 4,578 were appealed.
It was the conviction and death sentence of Brian Kinder for rape and murder.
A sharply divided Supreme Court today upheld the conviction and death sentence of a Virginia inmate whose court-appointed lawyer had represented the murder victim in an unrelated case until the victim's death.
On Thursday, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the conviction and death sentence of James Edward Hardy, originally found guilty of stabbing a woman and her son to death in 1981.
For a second time, an appeals court has overturned the conviction and death sentence of Rodney James Alcala for the 1979 murder of 12-year-old Robin Samsoe of Huntington Beach.
In an 8-1 ruling, the court threw out the conviction and death sentence of Glen Burton Ake for killing an Oklahoma minister and his wife in 1979.
In a separate ruling, the state high court affirmed the conviction and death sentence of Michael Ray Burgener, who was found guilty and sentenced to death for murdering a man during a convenience store robbery in 1981.
The state Supreme Court, citing a "blunder" by police, on Monday reversed the conviction and death sentence of a man found guilty in the frenzied "Halloween II" stabbing murders of an elderly Fullerton couple in 1982.
Earlier this week he was the lone dissenter on a case that overturned the conviction and death sentence of an alleged killer because Georgia prosecutors had systematically excluded blacks from his trial jury.
