Unlike the other criminal punishments, the death penalty is final. Once the court rules that one is guilty and the state executes that person, it is impossible to reverse the execution. From those 1861 cases, as many as 52 of those cases were invalidated based on some evidence of innocence. Even with those destructions, further studies demonstrated that at least twenty-three innocent persons were executed since 1900. These statistics show the fallibility of human judgment and how erroneous a decision of death penalty can be.
Many examples demonstrate the fallibility of human judgment.
In 1975, a year before the Supreme Court declared capital punishment constitutional, two African-American men from Florida, Freddi Pitts and Wilbert Lee, were released from death row. These two men were convicted of a murder as a result of forced confessions and fallible testimony of an eyewitness. However, the innocence of these two men was discovered after eighteen months in prison, and a nine-year battle ensued to prove their innocence. Another example took place in 1989 in Texas, where a man named Randall Dale Adams was convicted of murder. He spent more than three years in prison for the murder of a Dallas police officer.