Texas Court Upholds Death Sentence for Innocent Man

No constitutional grounds, they say, on which to overturn the sentence

With an opinion yesterday from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, ACLU client Max Soffar moves a step closer to an unjust execution.  And, little more than one year after the execution of Troy Davis, our system moves closer to another miscarriage of justice.

Soffar is an innocent man on Texas's death row, who falsely confessed to crimes he didn't commit.  He's been there most of the last 32 years after being convicted of killing three people in a 1980 Houston bowling alley robbery. His conviction was based entirely on false words from his own mouth.

Comments

[Cyto]

This is more proof that the death penalty is a failed government program. When our criminal justice system surrenders these types of decisions to procedural technicalities, it surrenders any moral authority to execute.

Well, yeah. But that doesn't go far enough. You think this situation is actually limited to death penalty cases? Or even that it is remotely more common among death penalty cases? To the contrary, I'd say that it is far more likely that this kind of injustice gets more likely the less significant the charge. I've never been falsely accused of murder, but I sure have been falsely accused of traffic violations before.