Friday, July 07, 2006

Opposing the machinery of death

The Fort Worth Weekly has a nice profile of anti-capital punishment activists Scott Langley and Sheila Stumph. They live and work in North Carolina now, but Texan Langley's journey began when he was dispatched at 22 to photograph at a death vigil outside the Walls Unit in Huntsville.

UPDATE: Via CrimProf Blog, the sister of Carlos de Luna, a man who was executed by the state of Texas for a crime the Chicago Tribune says he didn't commit, joined death penalty opponents in Houston recently to call for a statewide innocence commission to examine why innocent people end up on death row. I think the focus of an "innocence commission" should be broader: Why do innocent people end up in prison? Period. No need to narrow the subject - the same reliability problems that plague capital cases such as lying informants and biased forensic lab results also affect non-capital cases.

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