by Sean Wild
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The room is thirty-six by thirty-six feet. This is your home, but not by choice. You’re stuck here, put here against your will. And you know there’s only one way out… death.
This ominous reality hangs over you like a dark cloud. But why? We all have our faults, but you know you’re not meant to be here. How do you get out? How do you avoid the inevitable threat of a premature death? How can you convince them they have the wrong person?!
No, this is not the plot to a new horror film or the latest thriller TV show. It is the unfortunate reality many have faced in the American incarceration system: an innocent person on death row.
As of July 2024, the United States has seen 200 people exonerated from death row since 1973. The highest number of exonerations were seen in Florida (30), Illinois (22), and Texas (18).
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 1,594 people have been executed in the United States since the 1970s. A study published in 2014 in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal found that at least 4% of people sentenced to death are innocent.
When considering these numbers, there is a high likelihood that the state has executed some who were in fact innocent of the crime they were convicted of, and many innocent people remain on death row to this day.
Why start this count in 1973, you might ask? It is because this is the year following the landmark 1972 Supreme Court case, Furman v. Georgia, which explored if the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment applies to the use of the death penalty. The decision found the death penalty to be disproportionately applied to minorities and poor people, and that when applied in a discriminatory or arbitrary way the death penalty was unconstitutional. The Furman decision put the use of the death penalty on hold until it was reinstated through the 1976 case, Gregg v. Georgia.
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