The Innocent Man

If there is anyone who still thinks the death penalty is a good idea (and apparently a majority of my fellow citizens do), they should be forced to read The Innocent Man, by John Grisham.  It's a non-fiction account of, despite the title, five innocent men in Oklahoma.  Two of them were on death row, one of whom came within 5 days of being executed.  Two of the five are still in prison, serving life term, with no chance of a DNA test proving them innocent because they were convicted without a body being found or a crime scene to investigate.

Grisham says, about the process of writing this book:

The journey also exposed me to the world of wrongful convictions, something that I, even as a former lawyer, had never spent much time thinking about.  This is not a problem peculiar to Oklahoma, far from it.  Wrongful convictions occur every month in every state in this country, and the reasons are all varied and all the same--bad police work, junk science, faulty eyewitness identifications, bad defense lawyers, lazy prosecutors, arrogant prosecutors.

See also the website of The Innocence Project. They have helped exonerate close to 300 people, some on death row and others not, since they began their work in the late '80s.