They can adopt the Innocence Protection Act, a bipartisan proposal co-sponsored by death penalty supporters and opponents who agree that you can be tough on crime without punishing innocent people. The bill would give prisoners expanded access to possibly exculpatory DNA evidence. Helping defendants and prisoners who can prove their innocence would result in more arrests of real criminals. And making trials more fair would expedite the executions of those condemned killers whose guilt is clear, by speeding up the seemingly endless appellate process that now overturns a staggering percentage of all death sentences. Nationwide, some 95 inmates since 1973 have been released from death rows based on new evidence that either proved their innocence or cast grave doubt on their guilt.
Nobody knows how many innocent defendants have been executed or remain in prison.
For years, the Supreme Court, Congress, and the Clinton Administration seemed not to care. Congress in 1994 added death sentences for more than 50 federal crimes. Congress also defunded the Death Penalty Resource Centers, which had helped inmates with appeals. In other words, if a death row inmate can only prove that he is probably innocent, the state is free to execute him. But lately, the political landscape has changed.