This man is the unluckiest and luckiest man alive. Prolly would still be on death row...

Didn't you celebrate the death of a Russian oligarch's daughter a few weeks ago?

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The government and justice department are an entity I do not trust with that power.

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Amen to that.

In a study in the UK they found 30 murderers released between 2000 and 2011 went on to kill again.

In a smaller country with far less murders, so one can assume in any given decade over a 1000 are killed in the US.

Guess thats a small price to pay so one person can go free???

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This man is the unluckiest and luckiest man alive. Prolly would still be on death row...

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Sadly the LAPD are the ones who got the girl killed by implying she was an informant. The man was awarded several hundred thousand in settlement. The girl's family was awarded one dollar!

Eurotroll seems to have a bloodthirsty side, no?

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BTW - Did you celebrate the Death of Bin Laden? I did.

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Not his daughter?

We can talk Iraq in other threads.

The problem is, I think there are a LOT more than one in 1000 that this happens to.

You hear of these innocence cases where you have to wonder if the Cops don't focus in on a guy and then disregard anything pointing to an alterrnate suspect.

This Kirk Bloodsworth case (great name for a murderer....make that "murderer", eh?) is probably just as bad.

An Innocent Man

Former death row inmate Kirk Bloodsworth waged and won a nearly 30-year battle to end capital punishment in Maryland.

By Ron Cassie. Photography by Ryan Lavine | November 2013

The guards told Kirk Bloodsworth they had a work detail for him. A room near the prison hospital, above his cell and tier, needed painting, they said. When you’re locked up 23 hours a day, even painting becomes a welcome diversion, so Bloodsworth went along. The “room” that guards said needed painting turned out to be a 9-foot-tall, hexagonal steel vault—albeit with sealed glass windows, for witnesses. Square in the center of the cramped space, bolted to the floor, sat a steel chair with leather leg, arm, and chest straps—nicknamed the “captain’s chair.”

Bloodsworth, who had been found guilty of the rape and murder of a 9-year-old Rosedale girl, was sentenced to die in the chair he was now being told to paint. “You’ll be Captain Kirk soon.” “We want to get it ready for you.” “Paint it nice.” “Beam me up, Scotty…”

“Just jerks,” Bloodsworth recalls. “They thought it was funny.”

The guards also took it upon themselves to explain how the process worked. Hydrochloric acid would be poured into the vat beneath the chair. Once strapped in, at the warden’s signal, the executioner would mechanically drop cyanide pellets in the acid, filling the vault with putrid fumes that would sear Bloodsworth’s eyes and nostrils before reaching his lungs—the condemned are told to take deep breaths to avoid prolonging the agony. Gasping and choking would precede panicked contortions and seizures. It took about 10 minutes. Longer for a big guy like the young, 225-pound Bloodsworth, the guards said.

From that day forward, each time Bloodsworth walked into the exercise yard, he couldn’t stop himself from looking up at the concrete ventilation pipes, where the deadly gas left the chamber, atop the penitentiary’s roof. He began suffering suffocation nightmares, waking up and vomiting afterward. “For two years, I slept right below that room.”

Built in 1811, the massive, stone Maryland Penitentiary where Bloodsworth spent two years on death row and almost nine years altogether once held prisoners in dungeons. Since renamed the Maryland Transition Center, it looms in East Baltimore like a foreboding medieval castle. The state has executed 314 individuals in its history, nearly all here, most by hanging—the remnants of which also served as a haunting reminder of Bloodsworth’s fate. “They still had an outline [of the scaffolding] on the wall,” he says.

“You could see clearly in the yard where they used to hang people.”

Ultimately, in June of 1993, the twice wrongly convicted Bloodsworth became the first U.S. death row inmate exonerated through DNA evidence. Incredibly, it later turned out that the guy who actually abducted and murdered Dawn Hamilton slept in the tier below Bloodsworth—doing time on completely different charges.

SNIP

At the time, he’d gotten married and moved to Essex and was working six days a week in a furniture warehouse when his next-door neighbor told police he resembled the man in the sketch. Working through the list, nothing panning out, detectives eventually located Bloodsworth, whose one day off coincided with the murder. Police also learned he’d returned to his hometown of Cambridge shortly after the tragedy. Bloodsworth, admittedly a 23-year-old good ol’ boy who enjoyed his beer and pot, tried to explain he’d gotten into an disagreement with his then-first wife.

Several others where Dawn lived also later identified him in a photo line-up, but only after they’d seen his face on TV during his perp walk. That was the “evidence” against Bloodsworth. Meanwhile, he had 10 alibi witnesses and hadn’t been alone all day.

Well-informed on legal and criminal-justice issues, Bloodsworth can dispassionately detail all the practical, ethical, religious, racial, economic, and selective bias objections to the death penalty. But whether he’s talking to a law class, testifying in Annapolis or another state legislature, in front of Congress, or appearing on The Colbert Show, he hones in on a single point.

“There isn’t a system you can create run by human beings that is infallible,” he says. “Ann Brobst, prosecutor, very smart; Robert Lazaro, prosecutor, very smart; Det. Bob Capel, smart; the judges, smart; the juries, made up of concerned citizens. All trying to do the right thing.

“Dozens of people. Dead wrong.”

Baltimore Magazine -

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In a study in the UK they found 30 murderers released between 2000 and 2011 went on to kill again.

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Clearly, the standard of "beyond a shadow of a doubt" has to be based on clear facts not just circumstances and assumptions.

An opposite case, would be the Waukesha Christmas parade attacker Darrell Brooks. Or the Charleston, SC church killer and murderer indicted for deaths of 10 people at the Buffalo Tops Friendly Market. These are beyond a shadow of a doubt and should not have a chance to kill again anywhere.