Oklahoma botches court-stayed execution using new untested lethal injection.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Your link is from 1985. It's really not surprising considering the lack of sophistication of crime investigation in those times. Some of the cases would be even older considering there was no death penalty from 1967-1976.

And yet the study in the 4% thread presents similar statistics and was conducted including data post DNA eligibility.

[Captain Proton]

And yet the study in the 4% thread presents similar statistics and was conducted including data post DNA eligibility.

The rate of erroneous conviction of innocent criminal defendants is often described as not merely unknown but unknowable. There is no systematic method to determine the accuracy of a criminal conviction; if there were, these errors would not occur in the first place. As a result, very few false convictions are ever discovered, and those that are discovered are not representative of the group as a whole. In the United States, however, a high proportion of false convictions that do come to light and produce exonerations are concentrated among the tiny minority of cases in which defendants are sentenced to death. This makes it possible to use data on death row exonerations to estimate the overall rate of false conviction among death sentences.

Oh yes, estimation of unknowable stat. Such definitive data. Small sample size. Worthless study.

Also, it says it uses data starting from 1973, around a decade before DNA use in police investigations. So no, some of it was still before DNA was used.

Ronald Williamson was sentenced to death in Oklahoma in 1988, and awarded a new trial in 1997 because of constitutionally inadequate representation by his trial lawyer (16). He was exonerated by DNA testing 2 y later in 1999.

Even in the late 80s you still had an undeveloped process of police investigation using DNA.

[FlyingWoodchuck]

No, it's inserting details about why capital punishment costs more and disproving your claim that the housing of life sentence inmates is in any way "inconsequential."

Then you're being entirely unfair about how you apply costs that are part of capital punishment vs. those that are part of imprisoning someone for life.