On the contrary. The growing infallibility of forensic science should if anything increase, not lessen, our confidence in the accuracy of criminal verdicts. And if that is true of convictions in general, it is especially true in death penalty cases, which are subject to multiple levels of post-trial review and intricate layers of due process. Nevertheless, let us suppose the worst. Of course it isn't.
Patients die on the operating table because their surgeon made a mistake.
Forty thousand Americans die in car accidents every year. Anyone who said so would be dismissed as a crank. After all, if law enforcement officers go armed, innocent victims will sometimes lose their lives, as the recent deaths of Amadou Diallo in New York and Cornel Young in Providence, R.I., so tragically prove. If death penalty abolitionists really want to make sure that no one is unjustly killed by an agent of the state, they ought to call for disarming cops. No one who genuinely worries about the legal system putting innocent people at risk can afford to waste time denouncing the death penalty.