Kudos to the Tribune and to several of the national news magazines for keeping the death-penalty issue alive and the public well-informed. But there is another facet to this penalty issue. It seems certain to me that the rate of wrongful convictions in capital cases, where the issue of life and death is at stake, must be much lower than the rate of wrongful convictions for all the other cases requiring only imprisonment. Think of all the people rotting in prison wrongfully robbed of their freedom. In a democracy the greatest values are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Loss of liberty should be the ultimate punishment in a democracy. Yet we know that we are stealing the freedom of far more people than those on Death Row.
We don’t want to kill wrongfully convicted people. We can fix that simply by killing the death penalty itself. But we need even more to improve the process for all incarceration cases so that we minimize our robbery of the freedom of our fellow citizens.
