According to Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes, her office has been anticipating the resumption of executions for some time and believes they could begin as early as the first quarter of 2025. The death penalty has been on hold in the state at various points. In 2014, the death penalty was carried out and the defendant, Joseph Wood, succumbed only after two hours and the administration of over a dozen injections of an experimental drug. That incident, and other concerns, led to an eight year hiatus in the administration of the death penalty in Arizona. But executions began again, and the last death penalty in the state was in late 2022.
We wrote in our blog last year about the arguments surrounding the death penalty, noting that only about half the states still have capital punishment. And while discussions continue relating to the manner in which defendants are put to death, and about the morality of the death penalty itself, there is another issue that we believe is equally important in this debate, and often ignored.
The starting point is that capital punishment is imposed as the result of a jury finding a defendant guilty of certain crimes. Juries, however, are not infallible. Moreover, incorrect verdicts do occur. It is estimated that there have been close to two hundred victims of the death penalty who were wrongfully convicted of a capital offense, and later exonerated. Here are a few of the more common reasons for the wrongful convictions:
The bottom line is that in addition to botched executions and the moral issue hanging over the death penalty itself, we have the fact that people in this country have been wrongfully convicted of a capital offense and put to death. It’s no wonder that almost half the states in the country have abandoned the death penalty as a punishment after a criminal conviction.
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