Patrick Leahy

About the author: Patrick Leahy is the Democratic senator from Vermont.

Since the reinstatement of capital punishment in the United States in 1976, at least eighty-five inmates have been found innocent and have had their death sentences overturned. It is highly likely that wrongly convicted people have been executed. This serious crisis in the application of the death penalty is the result of a governmental unwillingness to ensure that defendants receive competent legal assistance and opportunities to be vindicated by postconviction evidence. States should be required to provide capital defendants with adequate legal representation, and inmates should be granted genuine opportunities to claim innocence on the basis of DNA tests and other kinds of potentially exonerating evidence. It behooves both the critics and...