I would be more interested in knowing their thoughts about being wrongfully convicted and locked up for decades in the first place. I would also be interested in asking those people what they thought about their "advocates" essentially saying that it's all right for them to be locked up forever as long as the state is not responsible for executing them. Those would be far more interesting questions to me.
I would also be interested in what the quality of life post-prison would be for such a person, and what assistance this person has received from the same people who would say it's such a relief that the state simply incorrectly locked them up for, let's say, 45 years. My guess is that there would be a lot of words but not a lot of action.
My point is, we seem to be okay with the state (an extension of we, the people) imprisoning people for the rest of their lives, but we start to squirm at the thought of the state executing those same people. I find this strange. As someone who actually works with and is frequently around formerly incarcerated people (ranging from armed robbery to white collar crime to sex offenses--no murderers, though) and hears from their point of view quite a lot, I can't help noticing how so many people have the thought of "out of sight, out of mind" for prisoners. We lock them up and then don't want to think about them again. If they get out, we either don't want to know about their criminal past or do everything we can to get them out of our communities. Whatever their crime was, even whether they were truly guilty of it or not (many defendants simply plead guilty even when they're not), we really don't care. So I'm skeptical of people who claim to care so much about wrongful convictions, especially for murder cases that result in life sentences. I think we like to pat ourselves on the back for our high sense of morality or whatever (which many people in this very thread are doing), and that's all we do. Forgive me if I'm not impressed.
100% agree.
The entire "criminal justice system" (or whatever you want to call it) needs a thorough cleansing, from top to bottom, inside and out, backwards and forwards. But that can never happen because 1) we really don't want to muster the energy necessary to do that; and 2) too many people with too many competing points of view would be pulling in too many different directions for a from-the-ground-up overhaul to take place. So instead what will happen is that there will be constant tweaks and refinements here and there, reacting to one event and then another, over and over. And before anyone says something like, "That's what happens in America!" this is a human phenomenon and happens in all human societies.
The job of the "authorities" is to protect the ruling class. This has been true in every human civilization throughout all of human history and is in no way, shape, or form an American phenomenon. It is true that in the US, especially in certain parts of the US but broadly true throughout, there is a distinct element of the "criminal justice system" being designed to keep black men away from white women (even today we see this in the "Karen" sensation of the last year). But the job of the police being fundamentally to protect the status quo is universal and quite literally what the police are designed to do. Many countries throughout history didn't even have "police" as we understand them today but more like a standing army whose job it was to keep the ruling class in power. And to a large degree it didn't matter to these people who got caught up in their power trips, as long as they held onto power.
At any rate, this is neither the forum nor the thread to get lost in the weeds on this matter, so this is the last I'll say about it.
