Word: rowed
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...have generated similar results. In a Gallup poll released in May, 73% of the respondents said they thought at least one innocent had been put to death in the previous five years. Yet only about half of Americans favor a moratorium on executions to ensure that those on death row should be there. In other words, most of us believe the death-penalty system is broken--and we don't care...
...most other jurisdictions that enforce the death penalty, Delamora would be appealing from death row. And maybe that's not such a terrible thing. After all, at least since 1976, the creaky contraption that is the U.S. death-penalty system has worked, in the most narrow sense: it hasn't executed anyone who later turned out conclusively--through DNA evidence--to be innocent (although it should be noted that states haven't allowed DNA testing in all disputed executions...
Reformers like Earle hope that the capital system can promise something greater than merely preventing death at the last minute. It took someone like Earle to keep Delamora off death row--someone willing to ignore a grieving widow, the local sheriff and his own staff. Which makes Earle both courageous and freakish. It's one thing to understand that the vengeful emotions that accompany the death penalty can trump the factual certainties required to mete it out fairly. It's quite another to intellectualize the issue when a woman has lost her husband...
...think deserves to die. That's why they elect me, to exercise that judgment and not bother them." Buried in that philosophy is something radical--the notion that the jury system, as it's currently constructed, can't be trusted to send only the guilty to death row. Most prosecutors wouldn't embrace that philosophy, which is why it may take an Earle, not a knight, to slay the demon of error...
...like the rest of us, Earle has now watched broken souls walk free after years of wrongful incarceration; 56 have been released from death row in the past decade, either because they were deemed innocent or because of procedural mistakes, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Unlike the rest of us, Earle still has to enforce the death penalty. He is often plagued by doubts when he must decide whether to seek death. "I agonize over it," he says. "There was a time when I thought the death penalty ought to have wider application, but my views have evolved...