Former Missouri Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Blackmar recently reiterated his opposition to the death penalty and his concerns about wrongful convictions, noting that the exoneration of Missouri death row inmate Joseph Amrine “makes me wonder how many people there are who were wrongfully convicted.” Amrine spent 26 years in prison, 17 of them on death row, before his conviction was overturned and he was released in July 2003. “The lesson is that people were persuaded eventually that he was innocent. But there are a fair number of people who were not guilty, who didn’t receive such treatment and were executed,” said Blackmar during his speech in Columbia, Missouri. During his discussion on the issue of innocence, Blackmar stated that even a sentencing error rate of one or two percent would be too much to justify maintaining capital punishment. (Columbia Missourian, November 11, 2004) See Innocence and New Voices.

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