Sept. 8, 2002 Salina Journal

Detroit police had every reason to believe Eddie Joe Lloyd was their man. He admitted killing a 16-year-old girl in a detailed written confession. He backed it up with an audiotaped account of the crime.

But some 20 years later, DNA testing proved Lloyd innocent. He was freed from jail last week after serving 17 years in prison for the crime.

His story should make us a bit uneasy about American jurisprudence in general, and capital punishment in particular.

Lloyd first contacted police eight months after the 1984 crime, when he wrote investigators from a mental hospital where he had been committed. That contact resulted in the written confession, which Lloyd says he believed was an effort to help find the real killer.

But the confession put him in prison, where he sat until his case was taken up by the Innocence Project at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. The project specializes in using new technology to free those wrongly convicted of crimes.

Lloyd is the 110th person found innocent because of DNA evidence. That record should make us all question how many other innocents are in prison or on death row. And it should make us wonder how many have been executed for crimes they didn't commit.

Consider that in 2000 Illinois Gov. George Ryan imposed a moratorium on capital punishment after finding that since 1977 Illinois executed 12 prisoners. But 13 death row inmates were exonerated since 1987 through appeals, DNA evidence and investigations by college journalism students.

Think about that: More were freed from Illinois' death row than were executed.

After 2 years of study, the Illinois governor's commission returned this statement:

"The Commission was unanimous in its belief that no system, given human nature and frailties, could ever be devised or constructed that would work perfectly and guarantee absolutely that no innocent person is ever again sentenced to death. "

If we can't guarantee no innocents will be killed, then why on earth do we allow capital punishment to continue?

Tom Bell, Editor & Publisher

Commentary, Salina Journal