" (Lowe) The fear of the punishment which protects society is instilled into the heart of every murderer by the finality of the death penalty. (Crowe 42) .
There are several privileges provided to the convicted that assure that the death penalty is given to the rightly accused person. Stephan Markman states that:.
In every capital case a unanimous jury of twelve citizens concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that an individual had committed a capital crime, usually first-degree murder. Further, in every one of these cases a trial judge and an assortment of appellate judges concluded both that the trial was fair and that the twelve jurors had acted reasonably in their determination. While such procedures do not give iron-clad assurances that innocent people have not been convicted, they place the burden of proof squarely upon the opposition. (Markman 85).
Because the death penalty is an extreme punishment, the judicial system works diligently to ensure that the decision is correct. Wesley Lowe states that far more innocent lives have been taken by convicted murderers than the supposedly 23 innocents mistakenly executed in this century. (Lowe) "Paul G. Cassell of the Wall Street Journal explained how the 68 percent figure (error rate) is deceptive: After reviewing 23 years of capital sentences, the study's authors (like other researchers) were unable to find a single case in which an innocent person was executed. Thus, the most important error rate -- the rate of mistaken executions -- is zero." (Eddlem 4) Even though there is a chance that an innocent person might be executed, the problem does not lie within the punishment. Smith, an advocate against the death penalty, believes that determining how the innocent got into prison in the first place will be the focus of the future over how to get the innocent out of prison. (Smith) Although a small number of death row prisoners have been released because DNA evidence has proven innocence, most have been released for political purposes or for technical reasons unrelated to guilt.
