By John Temple, Associate Professor of Journalism, West Virginia University & Associate Dean, P.I. Reed School of Journalism
A few weeks ago, anti-death penalty activists found a powerful argument for their cause: Cameron Todd Willingham.
Willingham is the Texas man who was executed in 2004 for arson murders that, as it turns out, he may not have committed. The case is making headlines again after a New Yorker piece made a compelling argument that the case was bungled and Willingham was innocent.
Since 1973, 138 people have been released from death row with evidence of innocence, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Abolitionists have used those numbers to reason that if that many people have been wrongly sentenced to death, some percentage of the 1,176 inmates executed since 1979 must have been innocent.
But until Willingham, activists lacked strong evidence of innocence in a prisoner who had actually been executed.
The abolitionist movement has used various arguments over the years. The contention that the death penalty is morally wrong seems to resonate with only a certain percentage of the population. The argument that death sentences are more expensive than life in prison and do little to deter murders has not led to a widespread shift in public opinion either.
Innocence, on the other hand, is a powerful, graspable concept. Innocent until proven guilty, after all, is a core tenet of our justice system, something most of us learn early on from our parents or in civics class.
But does the concept resonate when turned on its head - guilty and then proven innocent? What about someone who is found guilty and then returned to that uncertain state of limbo, somewhere in between innocence and guilt, called exoneration? Does exoneration always equate to innocence?
A case in point provides the narrative backbone of my new book, The Last Lawyer. The case began in 1987, when an elderly bootlegger was shot to death in Duplin County, a poor rural region in eastern North Carolina. Nearly four years later, the ex-girlfriend of a North Carolina farmhand named Bo Jones told police that he was the killer. On her testimony alone, Jones was sentenced to death in 1993.