Law Professor and Instapundit Glenn Reynolds reviews Scott Turow's new book Ultimate Punishment at his MSNBC weblog Glenn Reynolds.com today. Glenn succinctly describes Turow's main points:

...regardless of whether the death penalty is moral or not as applied to the guilty, everyone agrees that it’s wrong to execute the innocent. And, he says — echoing Charles Black — the innocent often wind up being executed. What’s more, as Turow demonstrates, prosecutors aren’t always above stretching a point to obtain a conviction...

But it's Glenn, not Turow, who makes the astute observation:

One needn’t, however, be soft on criminals to pick up on another point that Turow himself doesn’t raise: If death penalty cases, subject to far more rigorous safeguards than ordinary criminal cases, still manage to convict the innocent, how many innocent people are convicted of crimes that don’t carry the death penalty? Far too many, I would imagine. Some of the safeguards proposed for death penalty cases — like requiring that all questioning of suspects by police be videotaped, or that all defendants have access to DNA evidence that might clear them — should be applied to criminal cases across the board.

Peter Neufeld, co-founder and co-director of the Innocence Project, echoes this point in an interview with New Scientist.com :

There are wrongful convictions everywhere in the world. The US probably has one of the fairest criminal justice systems, but nevertheless we have seen how easy it is to make mistakes. It is certainly terrible to execute people who are innocent but it's not a hell of a lot better keeping them in prison for the rest of their lives. If you are innocent you are innocent and you don't belong there.

We wrote at length about Turow's involvement with capital punishment and his new book here. [link fixed]