[jambutty]

Originally Posted by Cyfr

Is that not the whole point of this debate? To have an academic discussion on the death penalty? You're in favour of it and hes asking you what you'd do when mistakes were made as you can't just release dead people from jail.

Playing devil’s advocate again are you?

Surely the whole point of a debate is to discuss issues that are relevant to the time. Obsolete issues I leave to the historians.

However to satisfy the curiosity of some people I will answer the question of “2 How do you say sorry to a corpse if they have been wrongly convicted and executed?”
You can’t. The best that can be done is to apologise to the corpse’s next of kin.

But there would be no need to apologise to anyone if certain safeguards were in place, as I have already explained in a previous post. But then who reads the whole thread before sticking their oar in? Some do although I suspect that many do not.

I would suggest that once a criminal is convicted of murder and the death sentence has been passed, it is not carried out for at least five years. This should be long enough for the defence team to launch appeals and seek out further evidence of innocence, if there is any, or challenge the validity of the prosecution evidence.

The police should be forced to reveal all the details of their investigation to the defence team and vice versa. Any forensic evidence should be available to the defence so that they can have it checked by an independent forensic analyst.

And finally the accused should HAVE to go into the witness box to be cross examined by both sides. Let the jury hear from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

OK! Who is going to be the first to trot out Stefan Kiszko who spent 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted? Back in 1976 forensic and medical science was nowhere near as good as it is today. It is highly unlikely that such an incident could occur today. And it is today and tomorrow this discussion is about, not yesterday.