Inmate released after 22 years on death row »
Posted By JamesMarcus 3 months, 1 week ago in NewsA former death row inmate was freed from a Nashville prison on Wednesday for the first time in nearly 23 years after an anonymous donor paid his bail. Paul House, 46, is set to be retried in October in the 1985 slaying of Carolyn Muncey.
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JamesMarcus
James Marcus is a writer, translator, critic, and editor. He is the author of Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot-Com Juggernaut and ...
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Goppy3 months, 1 week ago
As a Christian Conservative ... I say ... this is an affront to Justice.
We have an unshakable beliefe in the Absolute Righteousness of our Prosecutorial System of Goverment.
Everbody knows that many cities (or in the case of states - Texas) use prison to shunt away poeple that we find ... dont quite measure up to our High Moral Absolutist Standards.
We Conservatives have been VERY successful puttin all kindsa poeple in prison. We say ... if you get caught up in our Righteous Net of Justice.
Shure, theres problems with that ... innocent poeple get put away ... for long periods of tiem.
Plus ... our rabid desire for punitive sentences has caused a burgeoning prison population. And guess what! That costs MONEY!
And you know, we dont liek to support the Goverment ... no way ... no how.
So there's the quandary.
We want to put everyone we dont liek in prison - for LONG stretches ... but we dont want to pay for it.
Anybody got a solution for that?
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gamahuche3 months, 1 week ago
Doesn't this make you feel a little more cheerful, Nikki & BB?
This story is obviously incomplete but it seems probable that the benefactor who put up the bail money had some serious reason to believe that there had been a miscarriage of justice.
We don't know that from the story - the sentence that Candida quotes above is the only clue.
But lets also face the fact that you could probably fill a pretty good-sized prison with the ghosts of those who were wrongly convicted/railroaded, betrayed by useless lawyers and served time wrongfully.
Conversely justice has been ill-served by all the guilty parties who have escaped on technicalities, bribes, being able to afford clever lawyers.
We can't honestly adopt the attitude that everything gets evened out in that way.
IF an injustice has been done then we should allow the guy a smile, right?
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gamahuche3 months ago
Are the victim and his family served well by the conviction of the wrong person - IF that is the case?
That's a bit like if you see a child misbehaving and he runs away you whack the next kid that you meet to settle the score..
The one thing that is certain is that once a life has been taken away it can't be given back, even if there was a mistake.
That's just one of the reasons why capital punishment has been abolished in virtually every civilised country in the world - and also why convicted murderers get old on death row in the US.
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Ratskii3 months ago
Victims and their families aren't served by convicting the innocent. The families, especially, want to see someone pay. I had a friend who was brought up on charges for attempted rape. He didn't match the description that the victim gave, and the basis for charging him was that a plains clothes cop observed him looking over his shoulder at her when he passed her at the site of the original assault. They made him wear dark glasses (which is what the original assailant wore at the assault) while none of the other people in the lineup wore them. My friend is a lightweight that would be blown over in a stiff wind, but the prosecutor and the family of the victim tried to convict him just because he was accused.
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