In principle , I am in favor of capital punishment, but the way we do it is a mechanism of injustice. I’m not sure there is a solution.
The problem is the way that the severity of the crime makes juries less reliable.
When there is particularly severe circumstances (like a particularly horrific homocide) the psychological penalty for -not- convicting is much higher, and the desire to feel certain that a perpetrator has been found is much higher than say, a case of property theft.
Combined with the death penalty, these biases add up to a murder machine rather than an instrument of justice.
Estimations based on actual exonerations place the false conviction rate in some states >1%. If 1% are exonerated (which requires extraordinary evidence, often obtained by happenstance in solving other crimes) it’s a pretty safe bet we may be looking at >10% false convictions.
Add to this the fact that even confessions are unreliable, something I have some personal anecdotal experience with.
When I was eleven, school officials accused me of doing something I absolutely did not do. (and in fact there was no evidence that the thing had actually even happened, it was later told to me by the person claiming the event that it was fabricated from whole cloth)
I became so convinced that I did in fact do it that I invented an entire scenario where I had some kind of psychological episode, explaining why I did not directly remember doing the thing, but I was 100 percent sure that I had actually done it.
I am not, and was not , a weak minded person. I did, however, at that time, trust in the idea of authority figures.
It is not hard to to imagine that an adult on the other side of the bell curve that was basically trusting in society might easily fall into the same trap of disbelief->rationalization in an effort to to conform their reality to the “objective truth”.
After this experience,I don’t place much weight in confessions, even less in plea bargains.