Did Texas execute an innocent man?

[KSigkid]

Originally Posted by UGAalum94

You're right; I'm responding to the high profile cases. In these, it frequently seems that the general public and celebrities will jump in on behalf of prisoners while never really looking at the original case much at all.

Agreed to an extent - I think the death penalty is something like abortion, where people can easily jump in with highly-charged opinions without a whole lot of background knowledge on the subject.

As I've said on the board before, I generally hate it when celebrities jump in on ANY public policy issue. It bothers me that their opinions are given any additional validity than any other member of the public.

Originally Posted by UGAalum94

I just think the rest of us should avoid thinking questions being raised equals innocence.

ETA: I'm not talking about what burden of proof at trial should be required initially either. But the Tookies and Mumias of the world and their advocates shouldn't be taken purely at their word post conviction.

EATA: I was focusing the the death penalty because I do think there's a systematic effort to discredit it, maybe rightly so, and so even the smallest question about a case may get raised in the public mind to be "proof" of innocence. Maybe, maybe not, but we have a system in place to deal with it, unless, like we seem to have in this Texas case, the entire system fails. And when the entire system fails, maybe it doesn't make sense to lay the fault on early forensic testimony. The guy mention in the OP didn't die only because the prosecution fire expert wasn't really a fire expert.

I think I'm coming at this from a different starting point - while I'll agree that to some people, these types of stories automatically equal innocence, I think there are also a good number of us who understand that's not the case. To us, the significance is that it shows that there may have been a shoddy process, and that's a problem.

I generally don't like the Monday morning quarterbacking on trials (criminal or civil). Those outside of the trial teams don't know the thought processes of the attorneys, and decisions that seem silly in hindsight may have made sense at the time of trial.

The forensic testimony shouldn't take the whole blame...but it seems to have been part of the problem. In that regard, it can't really be ignored.

[UGAalum94]

I think that people forget that sometimes what the public knows isn't what was presented to the jury, often times for compelling reasons. Generally, I think, this kind of evidence being excluded favors the accused, but when there's a everything-but-the-kitchen sink standard outside the courtroom, it's kind of no wonder that legal outcomes are different than what the public thinks should have happened, particularly when people fail to be convicted of crimes that the public seems to believe they committed.

Unrelated to anything in this thread particularly, I do wonder if we aren't moving toward finding that it's really hard to prove guilt if we look at conviction being indicative of guilt rather than the outcome of more compelling theater than the defense put on.

Forensic evidence is more frequently discredited, and eye witness testimony and identification are almost ridiculously faulty. I tend to think that a successful prosecution is going to involve elements of multiple forms of "proof" but if we can later revisit the case and regard the failure of any part to call the whole thing into question, which as KSigKid notes might be a good thing in terms of the rights of the accused, we're going to have to devote more resources to giving the state the ability to re-investigate, store and re-test evidence.
(I don't mean double-jeopardy stuff; but if it's still up for more review, it doesn't make a lot of sense to leave prosecutors in the position of trying only to re-try the original case if more evidence might now exist.)