As for those who do, well in California alone it is estimated that over $4 billion LINK has been spent by the state trying to get these convicted murderers executed. So the idea these poor defenseless people are getting a raw deal is preposterous. They have advocates out the wazoo.
What you conveniently didn't address is how many murderers are acquitted to go back out and commit more murders. Here's a nice LINK to a page explaining what happens when convicted murderers are not executed, and are subsequently released. And while some sick people make the case these types of people will never be released, they ARE released!
How many murderers get released from prison having been convicted of a murder to commit murder again years or decades later? I don't have an exact percentage. I wonder if it's larger than 1.156 individuals per 200. And then there's the death count. Some of these wonderful people go back out to kill whole families, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5..., more.
Right now we have 3108 people on death row. Your 18 added to it is 3126 people. Your 18 amounts to 0.5758% of the total on death row.
That means that out of 200 people on death row, on average 1.156 were found innocent. So that being the case you determine 198.844 others should not receive the penalty they so richly deserve.
Another factoid you somehow forgot to mention, is the issue of retrials. How many of these 18 people got off because during a subsequent retrial decades later, the witnesses had died and evidence had been lost? Were they truly innocent? The Left says they are all innocent. Are they?
We're talking about Charles Manson and Company. We're talking about a man that raped a young girl who was telling him that Jesus loved him the whole time, right up until he savagely killed her.
Folks can read for themselves at the link above why I still support the death penalty.
I may not be your type of Conservative. Everyone has to make up their own mind. I've made mine up.
If I was arrested today and had to endure the death penalty, I would still be for it.
It has cost us $4 billion bucks to keep these people on death row, because bogus appeal after appeal after appeal has resulted in stay after stay after stay.
If anyone in California gets executed today, the great grand-children may get to see it. The actual children, parents, siblings, and other family members who may have witnesses the whole thing, and may themselves have barely escaped with their own lives won't.
But they will be able to live in terror every night, wondering if this guy has gotten out and may be lurking just outside.
Noooo! The hacks are the headline-hunting prosecutors and (sometimes) cops! They are the ones screwing up our justice system, and when they screw up, they blame the poor juries.
The OJ trial is a good example. Marsha Clark probably thought she was on the way to be governor. But, she was a hack who got outclassed by real lawyers. And the poor jury got the blame. Same thing happened in the Rodney King trial.
The death penalty is constitutional. But, I trust no government agent to do the right thing. The figures you cite are the PROVEN exonerations. How many more have been missed?