Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/14pdf/14-7955_aplc.pdf
Page Number: 54.0

4 

GLOSSIP v. GROSS 

BREYER, J., dissenting 

evidence  indicates  the  23-year-old  Arridy  was  innocent, 
including false and coerced confessions, the likelihood that 
Arridy was not in Pueblo at the time of the killing, and an 
admission  of  guilt  by  someone  else”);  R.  Warden,  Wilkie
Collins’s The Dead Alive: The Novel, the Case, and Wrong­
ful Convictions 157–158 (2005) (in 1987, Nebraska Gover­
nor  Bob  Kerrey  pardoned  William  Jackson  Marion,  who
had  been  executed  a  century  earlier  for  the  murder  of
John  Cameron,  a  man  who  later  turned  up  alive;  the
alleged  victim,  Cameron,  had  gone  to  Mexico  to  avoid  a 
shotgun wedding).

For  another,  the  evidence  that  the  death  penalty  has
been wrongly imposed (whether or not it was carried out), 
is striking.  As of 2002, this Court used the word “disturb­
ing” to describe the number of instances in which individ­
uals had been sentenced to death but later exonerated.  At 
that  time,  there  was  evidence  of  approximately  60 
exonerations  in  capital  cases.  Atkins,  536  U. S.,  at 
320,  n.  25;  National  Registry  of  Exonerations,  online  at
http://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Pages/about. 
aspx (all Internet materials as visited June 25, 2015, and 
available  in  Clerk  of  Court’s  case  file).    (I  use  “exonera­
tion”  to  refer  to  relief  from  all  legal  consequences  of  a
capital  conviction  through  a  decision  by  a  prosecutor,  a
Governor or a court, after new evidence of the defendant’s 
innocence  was  discovered.)    Since  2002,  the  number  of 
exonerations  in  capital  cases  has  risen  to  115.    Ibid.;  Na­
tional Registry of Exonerations, Exonerations in the United
States,  1989–2012,  pp. 6–7  (2012)  (Exonerations  2012 
Report)  (defining  exoneration);  accord,  Death  Penalty 
Information Center (DPIC), Innocence: List of Those Freed 
from  Death  Row,  online  at  http://www.deathpenaltyinfo. 
org/innocence-and-death-penalty  (DPIC  Innocence  List)
(calculating,  under  a  slightly  different  definition  of  exon­
eration,  the  number  of  exonerations  since  1973  as  154).
Last year, in 2014, six death row inmates were exonerated