Up to the moment that lethal injection took his life in the early morning hours of June 21, 1995, Larry Griffin insisted he was innocent of a drive-by murder in St. Louis.

Now new disclosures support his claim, and St. Louis Circuit Attorney Jennifer Joyce has reopened an investigation of the case.

A man wounded in the same drive-by shooting says Griffin was not involved. And the first police officer on the scene has given a new account that undermines the trial testimony of the only witness who identified Griffin as a killer.

There is no doubt that innocent men have been executed in America. 119 people in 25 states have found their way to death row, only to be exonerated later by new evidence, testimony, or appeals. Some death penalty advocates like to paint a picture where these are cases of “technical innocence” (bad defense, legal technicality) and not “actual innocence”, even in those cases where DNA evidence or someone else’s confession clearly shows a death row inmate to be actually innocent. To this date, we can note 25 cases where someone who was likely innocent was put to death.

So what do we do to rectify such a glaring injustice? Illinios issued a moratorium on the death penalty, and other states are seriously looking into the matter. But what do we do on the federal level to assure that no innocent man is ever murdered by the state?

Perhaps nothing… no, perhaps worse — let’s make it easier to execute death row inmates! Senator Jon “Lynching? What About It?” Kyl (R-AZ) and Representative Dan Lungren (R-CA) have introduced in their respective houses a bill called the Streamlined Procedures Act of 2005.

The purpose of this bill is to severly limit the federal appeals and review process for death penalty convictions. The Washington Post explains it like this:

CONGRESS HAS a novel response to the rash of prisoners over the past few years who have been exonerated of capital crimes after being tried and convicted: Keep similar cases out of court. Both chambers of the national legislature are quietly moving a particularly ugly piece of legislation designed to gut the legal means by which prisoners prove their innocence.

For a great many capital cases, the bill would eliminate federal review entirely. Federal courts would be unable to review almost all capital convictions from states certified by the Justice Department as providing competent counsel to convicts to challenge their convictions under state procedures. Although the bill, versions of which differ slightly between the chambers, provides a purported exception for cases in which new evidence completely undermines a conviction, this is drawn so narrowly that it is likely to be useless — even in identifying cases of actual innocence.

It gets worse. The bill, pushed by Rep. Daniel E. Lungren (R-Calif.) in the House and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) in the Senate, would impose onerous new procedural hurdles on inmates seeking federal review — those, that is, whom it doesn’t bar from court altogether. It would bar the courts from considering key issues raised by those cases and insulate most capital sentencing from federal scrutiny. It also would dictate arbitrary timetables for federal appeals courts to resolve habeas cases. This would be a dramatic change in federal law — and entirely for the worse.

This legislation plays upon the emotional response most people have to death row criminals. They are “monsters” that need to be “put down” and their constant litany of appeals are an impediment to exacting vengeance on justice for these killers.

I don’t discount that emotional response at all. Some people are monsters. You need only listen to that BTK Killer coldly describe his 30-year murder spree or follow a case like Joseph Duncan and his slaughter of the Groene family in Idaho to realize that some brains are just irrepairably broken. If I witnessed one of these wretched abominations of humanity kill someone I love, you’d only make it to the first “1” of dialing 911 before I would personally put a bullet in their skull. I’d gladly serve the prison time for weeding that cancer from the gene pool.

But when it comes to the state executing someone, I’m afraid I can’t support it. There are just too many inherent problems with the criminal justice system to guarantee that we won’t execute an innocent man. And now this bill would make it even easier for that travesty to occur.