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Wronged Wife to the Rescue
I am totally riveted by today's Washington Post story about the Baltimore cop convicted of killing his young mistress a dozen years ago—based on a discredited method of bullet-matching and the testimony of an "expert'' who faked his credentials, misrepresented his findings, and after he was busted, committed suicide. Now a judge may overturn the conviction, which is getting a second look mostly because the cop's wife has never given up on him. (Her position is that he cheated on her, but didn't kill anybody. Dude, what did you do to deserve this woman?)
Though this is not a capital case—the cop, James Kulbicki, got life without parole—it seems yet another example of the most undeniable problem with the death penalty: We get stuff wrong. Often enough that we ought to be humbled. And I'm eager to hear what you legal experts think of the New York Times story about the new studies that purport to find that capital punishment might "save lives'' by preventing murders in the states that impose it most freely.
I find this hard to believe, for one thing because I doubt that violent criminals, most of whom are drunk or high at the time of an attack, are at all apt to stop and think, "Uh-oh, do I really want to wind up like old Joe, who ate his last meal and then rode the needle? No! And so, my intended victim, never mind!'' I also cannot see how capital punishment, even as administered in Texas or Virginia, could have a statistically significant deterrent effect. How is it possible to isolate that effect from the larger law-and-order picture in those states?
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