I thought it was the jury, not the government. I don't know the threshold in which the death penalty should be applied. Clearly higher than it's been if even a single innocent person was sentenced.
But I'm positive that whatever the threshold is, I know it’s less than when a guy pleads guilty to 17 murders at a school, mostly children, and surveillance video shows him as he murdered said 17 people, even going back to those he wounded and shooting them again, and there's hard evidence that he had planned it for several months which shows the murders were cold, calculated and premeditated which is one of the aggravating factors the jury was suppose to take into account. And the response you have is that because innocent people have been sentenced to death in the past that therefore this guy shouldn't be put to death. Okay, that's what you're going with but I don't understand it.
The jury said that prosecutors had convinced them that the killings warranted the death penalty but they felt the circumstances of this poor little depraved psycho, which were the focus of the defense, outweighed what he did. Once they acknowledge the crime warrants a death penalty that should be the end of the story. The circumstances don’t lessen what he did in any way, shape or form, and saying it does is a slap in the face to the victims and their families. The jury is basically saying that if the shooter were sane and shot up a school, then it would warrant the death penalty because the shooter's circumstances would have been better. Makes perfect sense.
