Counting the Innocents on Death Row

While the majority of people on death row are undoubtedly not innocent, as Joshua Marquis suggests in his Feb. 26 commentary, he is being disingenuous when he compares apples and oranges in his final sentence. Marquis says we have more to fear from the guilty going free than from the innocents who are wrongly imprisoned--but we are not talking about the innocent being imprisoned, we are talking about executing them.

Turning the adage on its head that it is better to free 100 guilty men than imprison one innocent man, Marquis suggests that it’s not really such a bad idea to keep a few innocents in prison, or even to execute them, so long as it prevents a few guilty men from being freed. Have we really come that far from the ideals of the founding fathers?

Michael Goodman

North Hollywood

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Marquis cheers on the death penalty while minimizing errors in our judicial system. Meanwhile, on the front page an article informs us that half the examiners are unable to positively identify fingerprints reliably. First eyewitness reliability was called into question; now fingerprints. What in our justice system can we trust to assure that true justice is carried out?

Richard A. Hein

Fullerton