To Rinnaye
I agree with you on most things but the whole us Britains aren't better off because we no longer have the Death Penalty, I don't agree at all, just take a look at all the posthumously quashed convictions we have given out and I would say at the time in the 60s, we did not have the facilities to provide absolute proof of someones guilt DNA and such.
We made the right move and I'm sure because of that there are innocent men wrongly convicted still alive and able to plead there case in this era.
Here are just a few of the list.
Stefan Kiszko was convicted in 1976 for the rape and murder of an 11-year old Lesley Molseed in 1975. He spent 16 years in prison before he was released in 1992, after a long campaign by his mother. He died of a heart attack the following year at the age of 41. His mother died a few months later. In 2007, Ronald Castree, of Shaw, near Oldham, was found to have the same DNA as Lesley's attacker and was convicted at Bradford Crown Court.
Colin Stagg falsely imprisoned for the Rachel Nickell murder case on Wimbledon Common, London in 1992, but cleared in 1994.The case was thrown out on the grounds that police had used a "honey trap" plot in a bid to encourage him to confess. On November 28, 2007, Robert Napper, a convicted rapist and serial killer, was charged with her murder on the basis of new DNA evidence, and convicted on December 18, 2008. Stagg was subsequently awarded £706,000 compensation, and claims the false conviction ruined 14 years of his life, as he became unemployable and shunned.
Sally Clark was convicted in 1996 of the murder of her two small sons Christopher and Harry, and spent 3 years in jail, finally being released in 2003 on appeal. The convictions were based solely on the analysis of the deaths by the Home Office Pathologist Alan Williams, who failed to disclose relevant information about the deaths, and backed up by the paediatric professor Sir Roy Meadow, whose opinion was pivotal in several other child death convictions, many of which have been overturned or are in the process of being disputed. In 2005 Williams was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and barred from practicing pathology for 3 years. In July 2005 Meadow was also removed from the Medical Register for serious professional misconduct and prohibited from practicing medicine. Sally Clark became an alcoholic as a result of her ordeal and died of alcohol poisoning in 2006.
If there had been a death penalty all these people would not have had a chance to establish there innocence, although fat lot of good it did them, there lifes were still ruined.
