This spring the Republican-dominated New Hampshire legislature voted to abolish the death penalty, but Democrat Governor Jeanne Shaheen vetoed the bill. Hillary Clinton, sniffing the political winds, has quietly said she supports the death penalty in a state where New York voters in polls give it up to 80 percent support. But liberal death penalty opponents have been adopting tactics more effective than begging compassion for killers on death row. Some have appealed for that deep America virtue, fairness, by using improved DNA testing to make sure no innocent person is executed. Governor Bush has embraced this plea, as have the Republican governors of Illinois and Virginia.
Nobody wants to put to death an innocent person.
They would want it ended even if evidence of guilt were iron-clad, irrefutable, and confirmed 20 times each day by repeated voluntary confessions by the killer. Another emerging approach by death penalty opponents is brain scans. Where these can be found, they provide a way to argue that the convicted killer was a victim through no fault of his own. Medical science does not yet know with certainty what behaviorial abnormalities these oddities might produce. But the color brainscan pictures sure do look dramatic in a courtroom and can raise doubts in the minds of jurors, many of whom might have unscanned brain abnormalities of their own.