Nathanson, "to maintain the death penalty is to be willing to risk innocent lives." In 1987, a study conducted by Hugo Bedau and Michael Radelet appeared in the Standford Law Review concerning the execution of innocent people. The study concluded that in the period between 1900 to 1980, about "350 people were wrongfully convicted of capital offenses, 139 of the 350 were sentenced to death, and 23 were actually executed" (Nathanson 344). Over this eighty year period this figure averages out to the death of an innocent person about every 3.4 years. Those who support capital punishment claim that such cases of innocent people being executed have never occurred. For instance, Edward Koch quotes Hugo Bedau in support of his claim that such cases are not true, saying "it is false sentimentality to argue that the death penalty should be abolished because of the abstract possibility that an innocent person might be executed." Koch, in an attempt to gain political support, acted quite unethically by quoting Bedau out of context and implying that such cases have not occurred. According to David Bruck, a prominent lawyer for South Carolina Office of Appellate Defense, "all Bedau was saying was that doubts concerning executed prisoners' guilt are almost never resolved." Koch also failed to relate in his essay that Bedau, who had not yet released the 1987 study, had already comprised a "list of murder convictions since 1900 in which the state eventually admitted error" in about 400 hundred cases. Another response to the fact that innocent people have been executed is that the small number of innocents executed outweighs the number of lives that will be saved since the possibility of being executed will deter others from committing a murder, and also lives will be saved since that murderer cannot kill again. Scientific studies have failed to prove that executions deter other people from committing crime. According to Dr. Ernest van den Haag, a well-...
