Letters to the Editor
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Overshadowed by the death penalty
It seems to me that the cases that are the most troublesome are those people convicted on weak or contridictory evidence. As it is likely that the Fowlkes conviction would've been much more carefully reviewed if he had been assigned the death penalty, other cases that were decided on questionable evidence seem to suffer a simiar fate.
In cases with questionable evidence, courts seem reluctant to give the death penalty, which has the unintended effect of dropping the profile of the case and therefore the likelyhood that the case and evidence will undergo a thorough review. A similar case in Illinois would be the Alan Beaman case, which wasn't covered by Gov. Ryan's mass commutation, where a conviction that relied on shaky circumstantial evidence is still looking for a court to review the case.