No longer shall I tinker with the machinery of death. In death penalty circles, the name James Liebman is not a strange, or unknown one. Judges know the name, as do defense lawyers.
Prosecutors know it too, and so do guys on Death Row.
They know because Liebman is half of the duo who wrote the definitive work on the American death penalty, examining laws, statutes and cases. But it is not this work which has caused the cascade of interviews of Liebman in recent weeks. Liebman studied 5,760 convictions where people were sentenced to death. Other reasons for reversals were prosecutorial misconduct, falsified confessions, crooked cops, and errors by judges. Liebman describes a system that is virtually designed to fail.