Comments on: This Week in Innocence

By: jkw

jkw — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:08:52 +0000

Paul House has been released from prison. He has MS, is confined to a wheelchair (I believe) and is now house-bound at his mother’s until they decide how to handle this poor man’s fate.

By: Thomas Blair

Thomas Blair — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:24:54 +0000

La Rana: Right, I live in Huntsville. I think he probably just heard that phrase on Judge Joe Brown and thought that’s the legal jargon for “guilty”. If it’s not misspoken, it betrays a level of ignorance I fear coming from someone signing the death warrant.

By: Highway

Highway — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 17:08:00 +0000

How can people go through life with so little thought. Essentially, he’s saying the same thing as “It’s good if we kill a person who’s innocent, because it preserves the system and makes the family feel better.”

Words really cannot express the despair I feel at seeing that ANYONE could make this statement. And with such a prominent position occupied by the speaker, it just further solidifies my thoughts that government is entirely useless and broken. That people who are that thoughtless, that stupid, and that self-absorbed are allowed anywhere near the government (and I’d add *in the human race*) is just so vile and disgusting that it makes my brain shut down.

By: La Rana

La Rana — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 16:19:23 +0000

Thomas, its Alabama.

By: Thomas Blair

Thomas Blair — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:54:37 +0000

This was the quote from Riley that left me seeing red:

“There was a preponderance of evidence, physical evidence and confessions, that led to that decision, and a DNA test could not have possibly changed it.”

Perhaps he just misspoke, but the standard for criminal conviction is “beyond a reasonable doubt”. The evidentiary standard for civil cases is the “preponderance of evidence” or “more likely than not”.

By: Matt Moore

Matt Moore — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:47:28 +0000

That Riley quote is mind blowing. He does know that they waited until the “last hour” to ask for the DNA because there was no such thing as DNA testing during their original trial, right?

By: Wesley

Wesley — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:39:40 +0000

… it’s not fair to the family to not kill an innocent man? What?!?

That’s one of the most horrible and dumb things I’ve heard seriously mentioned by a politician regarding our criminal justice system. “Exonerating an innocent man who the system convicted is unfair in the system.” What is the “system” and why does it care? Will its feelings get hurt? What is the whole POINT of the system existing beyond punishing the guilty and NOT punishing the innocent?

By: Adam

Adam — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:00:30 +0000

I love this quote from Riley –

“Too often, especially when it takes 20, 25 years for one of these sentences to be carried out, to ask for the DNA only in the last hour, when it could have some ramifications, I don’t think that’s fair to the system (or) the family,” he told me.

Not “fair to the system”? Holy shit – apparently it’s more important to be fair to the system than to make sure that the guy the system’s about to execute is actually guilty.