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Originally Posted by Crompsin
Death penalty IS about justice. Yeah. No repeat offenders treated by the electric chair.
Death Penalty: When you care enough to go all the way.
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okay....who do you execute? Would you "do" this former cop?
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...ail/components
SILENT INJUSTICE A Twist to the Left
A Murder Conviction Torn Apart by a Bullet
In a 1995 Maryland Case, Key Testimony and the Science Behind It Have Been Discredited
By John Solomon
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 19, 2007; Page A01
Former Baltimore police sergeant James A. Kulbicki stared silently from the defense table as the prosecutor held up his off-duty .38-caliber revolver and assured jurors that science proved the gun had been used to kill Kulbicki's mistress.
"I wonder what it felt like, Mr. Kulbicki, to have taken this gun, pressed it to the skull of that young woman and pulled the trigger, that cold steel," the prosecutor said during closing arguments.
Prosecutors had linked the weapon to Kulbicki through forensic science. Maryland's top firearms expert said that the gun had been cleaned and that its bullets were consistent in size with the one that killed the victim. The state expert could not match the markings on the bullets to Kulbicki's gun. But an FBI expert took the stand to say that a science that matches bullets by their lead content had linked the fatal bullet to Kulbicki.
The jurors were convinced, and in 1995 Kulbicki was convicted of first-degree murder in the death of his 22-year-old girlfriend......
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...and do you execute cops and prosecutors who are convicted of knowingly falsifying evidence that is key to a death penatly conviction and sentence, or who deliberately sit on potentially exonerating evidence in capital crime cases?
I read you're short and absolute comments and they don't seem to be thoroughly thought through, odd in a discussion of whether the people should grant the authority to kill, to authority, don't you agree?
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Originally Posted by dksuddeth
I fully support the death penalty, however, I believe that the preponderance of evidence should be so overwhelmingly obvious, that guilt can't even be questioned as a hypothetical. video evidence would be great, otherwise, forensics should have to conclude that not even 1 in 1,000,000,000,000 chance that someone else committed that particular crime.
That being said, the sentencing phase of a trial should be done by a seperate jury than the one who decided guilt or acquittal. In most criminal trials, a jury of 12 of your peers listens to the evidence and decides whether or not you committed the crime. A sentencing jury should have 15 people on it and a death sentence MUST be decided by 2/3rds or more.
As in all death sentences, an appeal is automatic. This appeal should no longer be done by just a courtroom judge or bench. As all too often happens, a black robed tyrant inevitably fucks up the system by implementing his own ideology over the laws and we end up with murderers released on technicalities or innocent people still on death row. A death sentence appeal should be handled by yet another jury of peers, 15 again, and either the confirmation of said death sentence or commutation to life should be decided by 4/5ths of the peer jury.
Unfortunately, I don't see this happening because not enough people would care about the justice system as it pertains to criminals to actually want to be involved.....but if they were somehow caught up in it as a defendant, I wonder if that would change their mind?
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So...are you saying that enough examples of a flawed system, unequal in the way the accused are represented, investigated, prosecuted, and evaluated for possible clemency, along with the finally admitted flaws in it's forensic science by the FBI, and what was revealed about the FBI's and prosecutors' (lack of) commitment to protecting the rights of the accused, an even bigger shortcoming than the abandoning of it's long love affair with "bullet science"...are enough to convince you that it's just about impossible to fairly...with 100 percent certainty...apply the death penalty?