Editor,
If through silence we are duplicitous, today I became a killer.
A northern transplant, I had time to speak out with seven years in residence, but not until Terry Clark started down the plank did I take notice of our archaic capital punishment law.
Clark claims guilt and accepts punishment. But what of the men and women behind him also sentenced to die?
Joe Ingle, considered for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1988 for his efforts to end the death penalty, wrote in 1990 that he had worked with 18 people who were later executed and "five of those I'm convinced were innocent," he said.
Harvard Ph.D. Hugo Bedau, considered America's leading expert on capital punishment, said that nearly every year in the last century, in some jurisdiction, at least one person convicted to death was later found innocent.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
With human error near the helm of the United States' system of injustice the risk of convicting innocent people to die is too great for such a policy to continue to exist.
Laurie Mellas-Ramirez
UNM staff
