In 2015, Billingsley was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with 16 years suspended, after he pleaded guilty to a first-degree sex offense, court records show.
The Maryland sex offender registry shows he was released from prison in October. The registry classified him in “tier 3,” which includes the most serious charges and requires offenders to register for life.
And if someone is falsely convicted of this sort of crime and executed, that person’s family too will never be the same. And it is not possible to create a system in which criminals are successfully prosecuted but where false convictions cannot happen
Yeah, it’s better to imprison an innocent for life than to kill them.
One is acceptable. The other isn’t.
If new evidence exonerates a living person, they can be released. You cant bring an innocent dead person back to life.
Yeah, but that doesn’t mean every innocent person in prison for life is going to get exonerated before they die.
The argument that “the death penalty should be abolished because some innocent people are convicted” doesn’t hold any water because innocent people can be convicted with life imprisonment as well and die before being found innocent. Does that mean we shouldn’t sentence people to life in prison?
Which brings me back to my previous point: it’s acceptable to imprison innocent people for life, but not to execute them. At least in your minds.
It is not acceptable to punish an innocent person at all in my mind, but it is also not acceptable to sit by and do nothing about dangerous and malicious behavior, and so it becomes necessary to choose the lesser evil.
Executions should only be reserved for the worst of the worst. The people who don’t care they murdered someone. A father that executes his 3 kids and is cool with that is a perfect example for it or a person who is a serial rapist who has now committed murder and NOT the legally ambiguous.
“We don’t quite know if you did that crime so it will be life instead of execution.”
“Oh you just wanted to kill 30 people because you hate your life, don’t worry the state will sort you out”