Does anyone really think the system is infallible? Can we bet a potentially innocent human being's life on it? It's the best we've got, but let's not pretend it's perfect. At least the wrongly imprisoned can be freed; no one argues for the dead, and it wouldn't do any good if they did. If you're a rabid supporter of the death penalty you have to accept that there's a chance that someone didn't do it but will be executed anyway. That's bs. In this case it was a good thing that the man was able to extend his legal fight and not have been executed immediately after trial the way some would have had it.
UPDATE: Glenn Ford was indeed released from prison late Tuesday afternoon local time. The same judge who denied him relief in 2009 was the one who signed the order authorizing his release.
Ford's dogged lawyers and enlightened parish prosecutors in Shreveport both filed motions late last week informing a state trial judge that the time has come now to vacate Ford's murder conviction and death sentence. Why? Because prosecutors now say that they learned, late last year, of "credible evidence" that Ford "was neither present at, nor a participant in, the robbery and murder" of the victim in his case, a man named Isadore Rozeman...
