> > I am well aware that only 400 (?) people have
> > been sentanced to death since it was decided
> > that execution was not "cruel and unusual
> > punishmant" in 1967
>
> What? As of January 1, 1999, California alone has 519 people on death row. Texas has 441, Florida has 390, etc. I don't know where you get your figures, but they're bizarre.
> -eric sleator

I'm guessing he meant 'executed' rather than merely 'sentenced.' Still, the number I found with Google was 697 executions, and there have probably been a few more since whenever that story was written. I couldn't find the exact number, but there have been more than 46000 people on death row in the same time period, and 95 have been found to be wrongly convicted. That seems like an acceptable accuracy rate to me. It would be, of course, a genuine tragedy if an innocent person was put to death. Using the same percentage, however, we might estimate that only one person would have been wrongfully put to death. Then again, that claim can't be made, since every case is unique: they don't get convicted on statistics. But, in my view, the ones who were put to death were probably the ones we were most sure about.

gab"number juggling"by