“Dead Innocent: The Death Penalty Abolitionist Search for a Wrongful Execution” by Professor Jeffrey L. Kirchmeier was recent­ly pub­lished in the Tulsa Law Review. The arti­cle exam­ines the poten­tial impact that the con­firmed exe­cu­tion of an inno­cent per­son would have on the U.S. death penal­ty debate. The author states that iden­ti­fy­ing those who have been wrong­ly con­vict­ed and lat­er freed — as well as indi­vid­u­als who may have been inno­cent and exe­cut­ed — pro­vides clear rea­son for law­mak­ers and the pub­lic to re-exam­ine the death penal­ty, but he cau­tions that it does not alone spur peo­ple to aban­don cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment alto­geth­er.

In his exam­i­na­tion of his­toric and mod­ern day cas­es where ques­tions of inno­cence have been raised after an exe­cu­tion, Kirchmeier dis­cuss­es how these cas­es have con­tributed to a series of impor­tant mile­stones in the dis­cus­sion of the death penal­ty. He con­cludes, “[H]uman beings have been mak­ing reforms to avoid wrong­ful exe­cu­tions since at least the 1600s. Yet … we still make mis­takes. After all, we are human.”

(J. Kirchmeier, ​“Dead Innocent: The Death Penalty Abolitionist Search for a Wrongful Execution,” 42 Tulsa Law Review 403 (2006)). See Law Reviews, Innocence, and Resources.

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