About three in ten murderers were later found not guilty and executed. shoud we stop executions over

I worked for 25 years in the Texas Department of Corrections and for the State and Federal Courts. I have worked with adult and juvenile offenders. I also support Project Innocence, more appeals for inmates, ACLU and mandatory DNA testing of evidence when necessary. Also do not fool yourself into thinking that you can not be sentenced to die for a first offense. Texas has the busiest death chamber in the United States, something I am not proud of. I am not against the death penalty, I do belive it should be applied fairly and only when there is no other way to protect society. Believe me when I tell you that doing life is a much harsher penalty than dying. Some of the abuse suffered by the inmates at the hands of the staff are the things of nightmares. So before we take that step to take another persons life, we need to be absolutely sure that there is no shred of innocence, even if this takes years. Those years are not spent in luxury, trust me I know from experience,

I'm English so the notion of the death penalty is slightly disturbing in many ways as it's alien in my culture. If you have a death penalty in your society I suppose you must accept that there will be a margin of error and innocent people will die as a result of your system.

So, to follow the logical argument, and to say that's accepted, why wait so very, very long to kill your prisoners? If the system is accepted then executions should be immediately after the appeals process is complete I'd have thought.

The fact that prisoners are on death row for years suggests an underlying uncertainty in the use of the death penalty as a punishment, be that for cultural or political reasons.

The end result seems to me to be a pretty miserable torture whereby you're sentenced to several years of psychological abuse before being killed. Perhaps that's the point. Whether that's a sucessful deterrent I don't know.

In my opinion, NO. I do know it is tragic for innocent people to lose their lives, but were they really innocent? You are not going to receive the death penalty (in most cases) for a first offense. These scumbags spend YEARS on death row. With groups like the Innocence Project, and the ACLU working to get them off, if after all those years they are executed, TOO BAD. I know I sound really heartless, but if the death penalty were carried out more quickly, the taxpayers would save a fortune spent on the care of inmates. Knowing that if convicted and sentenced to death the penalty would be carried out within say 3 years, some people MAY reconsider BEFORE committing the crime.