That whole "perfectly applied" thing — the goal of which requires the person being put to death to actually be guilty — also troubled others. Marie Diamond at Think Progress Justice undertakes a thorough debunking of the idea that everyone executed in Texas in the past decade or so was guilty:
---Sent from Steve's iPad...[D]uring Perry's tenure as governor, DNA evidence hasexonerated at least 41 people convicted in Texas, Scott Horton writes in Harper's. According to the Innocence Project, "more people have been freed through DNA testing in Texas than in any other state in the country, and these exonerations have revealed deep flaws in the state's criminal justice system." Some 85 percent of wrongful convictions in Texas, or 35 of the 41 cases, are due to mistaken eyewitness identifications.
Those exonerations include Cornelius Dupree, who had already spent 30 years in prison for rape, robbery, and abduction when DNA evidence proved unequivocally that he was not the man who had committed those crime. Tim Cole, the brother of Texas Sen. Rodney Ellis (D), was posthumously pardoned a decade after he died in prison when DNA evidence proved his innocence. The total failure of the Texas courts to protect these innocent individuals reveal a system plagued by racial injustices, procedural flaws, and a clemency review process that's nothing but a rubber stamp on executions.
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