Philip Brasfield

About the author: Philip Brasfield is a contributing editor of The Other Side, a progressive Christian journal. He is also the assistant executive director of the Lamp of Hope Project, an organization that advocates for the civil rights of prisoners, and an adviser to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. He has been in prison for more than twenty years.

The growing public awareness about wrongful convictions and the number of innocents who have been sentenced to death has changed the dynamics of the death-penalty debate. The use of postconviction DNA evidence, which has exonerated dozens of wrongly accused inmates, has helped to reveal the fallibility of the legal system. Many who promote the use of DNA evidence believe that it will enable law enforcement officials...