In 2005, in a case known as Kansas v. Marsh, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared that there has not been “a single case - not one - in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit.” He added, “If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby.”
What is clear to Scalia, however, is not clear to everyone. On the contrary, there is overwhelming evidence that a considerable number of innocent persons have been executed in recent years. To contend that it has not happened even once, as Scalia and countless other, less well known proponents of the death penalty do, defies the laws of probability and common sense.
Moreover, there are a number of cases in which there is such overwhelming doubt of guilt that the only rational inference to be drawn from reading them together as a collection is that almost all most, if not all, of the defendants were innocent.
Read about their cases:
James Adams
Timothy Baldwin
James Lee Beathard
Ruben Cantu
Willie Darden
Girvies Davis
Carlos DeLuna
Johnny Frank Garrett
Gary Graham (a.k.a. Shaka Sankofa)
Larry Griffin
Leonel Herrera
Claude Jones
Joseph Roger O'Dell
Roy Michael Roberts
David Wayne Spence
Jesse J. Tafero
Dobie Gillis Williams
Cameron Todd Willingham
