Main drawback to death penalty: Not guilty

The recent editorial regarding the death penalty (Dec. 16) omitted the most important factor on this subject: innocence.

Watch the award winning documentary “After Innocence” and you will be convinced that the United States should get out of the killing business. Hundreds of wrongly convicted prisoners have been released in the past decade due largely to improved DNA evidence. These people aren’t getting off on a technicality — they are literally innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted. A life sentence can be reversed — a death sentence that’s carried out eliminates the possibility of correcting a horrible wrong.

How many people have to be wrongly executed before we decide to abolish the death penalty?

Rod Porsche, Albany

Coming to George Will’s defense

A recent letter (“See, conservatives have no heart,” Dec. 9) elicited a huge “HUH?” from me until I found the Dec. 2 George Will column he was referencing.

The rant writer seems to imagine that George Will “quite obliviously equates worrying about a sick child with worrying about the cost of cable or being stuck in traffic.” No, he makes no such equation; he was wondering what Hillary Clinton meant when she was talking about freedom, opportunity, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and what all that meant to parents who can’t take a sick child to the doctor.

Will’s response: “Well, OK, what does ‘all that’ mean to someone stuck in congested traffic? Or annoyed by the price of cable television? What does Mrs Clinton mean?”

What does all that — freedom, opportunity, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — mean to our concern over multi-level government mandates, taxes imposed while calling them fees and permits, misleading ballot titles, mischief wrought in the name of The Children — please add your own.

The letter writer closes with, “A human being would have noticed what was wrong with that equation.”

It appears Mr. C. does not understand that a human being capable of rational thought would not have reached such a convoluted conclusion.

Violet Gibson, Scio

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