Arthur Miller believed that too many unsupported assumptions go into declaring that a person committed a murder:
Any honest supporter of the death penalty simply cannot avoid facing the high probability of mistaken verdicts, of which there are indeed many in this country. The nation’s conscience forbids the state to kill innocent people. The death penalty makes the presumption that there are never going to be corrupt, ambitious, cowardly prosecutors and police who, afraid to admit they were wrong in arresting a suspect, go down to the end insisting on his guilt; that there are never honest mistakes in judgment, never any visual misidentifications, but that in each and every prosecution the guilty verdict is invariably deserved.
(Quoted from “Luck and the Death Penalty: Community Involvement,” by Arthur Miller, in Chapter 9 of Anatomy of Innocence, edited by Laura Caldwell and Leslie S. Klinger. Liveright Publishing, 2017.)
For a brief biography of Arthur Miller, click here. For images of or relating to Arthur Miller, click here.
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