Gov. Perry says he never loses sleep over executing the innocent

originally by: ThinkProgress
published: 8th September 2011

At last night’s GOP presidential debate in California, front runner Gov. Rick Perry (R-TX) defended his record of overseeing 235 executions in Texas, the most of any modern governor by far and nearly half of those conducted in the state since the death penalty went into effect in 1976.

Perry insisted that he’s never lost sleep at night worrying that any one of them might have been innocent. “I’ve never struggled with that at all,” Perry said.

That’s despite the fact that during Perry’s tenure as governor, DNA evidence has exonerated at least 41 people convicted in Texas, Scott Horton writes in Harper’s. According to the Innocence Project, “more people have been freed through DNA testing in Texas than in any other state in the country, and these exonerations have revealed deep flaws in the state’s criminal justice system.” Some 85 percent of wrongful convictions in Texas, or 35 of the 41 cases, are due to mistaken eyewitness identifications.

Those exonerations include Cornelius Dupree, who had already spent 30 years in prison for rape, robbery, and abduction when DNA evidence proved unequivocally that he was not the man who had committed those crime. Tim Cole, the brother of Texas Sen. Rodney Ellis (D), was posthumously pardoned a decade after he died in prison when DNA evidence proved his innocence.

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Posted by Kushi Amlak-Sakhu on 10/09/2011. Filed under Capital Punishment,Policy & Reform. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry