by Patrick Appel
Mark Kleinman wants government money spent to identify innocent men:
If only 1% of our prison inmates are factually innocent - which seems to me like a ludicrously optimistic estimate, given how many convicts have been exonerated by DNA testing - we have 17,000 people behind bars at any one time for crimes they didn't commit. As far as I know, no jurisdiction in the United States maintains a team of investigators dedicated to developing new evidence to overturn guilty verdicts (and pleas). That's a crime. And it's also a crime that Gov. Rick Perry's role in allowing the execution of an innocent man seems very unlikely to damage his political future in Texas.