DNA testing continues to show just how blind justice can be
Even one wrongly convicted is too many.Blind to justice: Evidence grows for a moratorium on death penalty
DNA testing continues to show just how blind justice can be.
Last week, Patrick Waller walked out of a Texas prison after spending more that 15 years in jail for a crime he didn’t commit.
The Associated Press reported that Walker had been behind bars since late 1992 on convictions for aggravated robbery and aggravated kidnapping stemming from the abduction of a Dallas couple.
However, DNA testing conducted late last year proved Waller was innocent. The news service reported prosecutors say the DNA profile matched another man, who is free on parole.
While justice was finally served in Waller’s case, the troubling aspect of his release is that he is the 19th man in Dallas County since 2001 shown by DNA evidence to be innocent of the crime for which he was convicted.
At least in Waller’s case, he did not face the death penalty.
Lester Leroy Bower Jr. does, and his case raises serious questions about the indiscriminate use of the death penalty, especially in Texas.
Bower was convicted for the 1984 execution-style murder of four people in an airport hangar just north of Dallas. A jury deliberated just two hours before convicting him, then deliberated only two hours more the following day before deciding he should die for the murders.
For the jury to convict and condemn so quickly, you’d think it was an open-and-shut case.
It was anything but that. The AP reported no fingerprints put him at the scene, no witnesses saw him at the hangar, and the murder weapon was never found. Bower never confessed and has maintained his innocence.
He was convicted and sentenced to die based on circumstantial evidence.
DNA testing wasn’t available in 1984. Last week, a state judge stopped his execution, which was scheduled for July 22, and agreed to consider Bower’s request that evidence be examined to see if DNA testing could back up his claim of innocence.
Bower might or might not be the killer.
What is clear, though, is that he should not be on death row when there was no hard evidence linking him to the murders.
The cases of Waller and Bower might not bring an end to the death penalty.
However, they certainly reinforce the argument for a nationwide moratorium.
Too many innocent people are now being freed from jail to have any confidence that the criminal justice system always executes the right man.
Labels: death+Penalty+blind+justice
posted by ... @ 1:09 PM
0 comments
