Eyewitnesses at various sniper shootings swore that the sniper drove off in a white van. Or a Burgundy Caprice. They were so sure, in fact, that police repeatedly caught the snipers at roadblocks but waved them through because they weren’t driving the cars that the witnesses were positive were connected to the shootings.
So all those witnesses were wrong. More people died because of that, actually. I’m not blaming the witnesses, God knows. It wasn’t their fault. It was a stressful situation.
But it leads me to wonder how many people are on death row…mostly because of eye witness testimony. And of those people, how many of them are physically larger than cars, and thus even easier to ID? I’m guessing none. How many of them are, in fact, smaller than cars and probably tougher to ID? I’m guessing all.
But hey, no one’s ever been wrongly executed because of misidentification. Right? We’re all certain of that. Why, we’re as certain of that as we are of what kind of car the snipers were driving.
The sniper’s been stopped. The death penalty lives on. And state governments remain the biggest serial killers in America.
Food for thought.
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