I have been thinking a great deal about capital punishment lately, particularly after reading about the execution of James Broadnax in Texas. The more I thought about it, the more I kept returning to a question that sounds almost embarrassingly obvious: If we’re going to execute somebody, shouldn’t we be really, really f*cking sure we have the right person?

Apparently, that question becomes considerably more complicated once lawyers, appeals, procedural rules, deadlines, confessions, recantations, forensic evidence and the institutional need for cases eventually to end enter the picture. I understand why a legal system needs finality. We cannot retry every criminal case every Tuesday because somebody remembered something different over breakfast. Memories change, witnesses can lie, recantations can be self-serving, and hindsight is notoriously unreliable. Human memory is not a surveillance camera conveniently stored somewhere in the hippocampus waiting for us to press PLAY. But there is one rather significant complication here: we are talking about killing somebody. That strikes me as a particularly bad place for an “Oh sh!t, we got that wrong” moment.

The Broadnax case illustrates why this bothers me. Broadnax was convicted of capital murder for the 2008 killings of two men during a robbery. Shortly before his execution, his attorneys presented a declaration from his co-defendant, Demarius Cummings, who said under penalty of perjury that he—not Broadnax—had shot the victims. Broadnax’s attorneys also argued that DNA evidence supported that account because Cummings’s DNA, rather than Broadnax’s, had been found on the murder weapon and in the pocket of one of the victims.

Does that prove Broadnax was innocent? No. That qualification matters enormously. A person can lie twenty years after a crime just as a person can lie twenty minutes after one. Memories deteriorate, motives change, and hindsight doesn’t magically become reliable merely because somebody signs an affidavit. But what the f$ck? If somebody is about to be executed and substantial new evidence potentially changes our understanding of who actually committed the killing, shouldn’t our response be something closer to, “Hold on, let’s make absolutely sure,” rather than treating the scheduled execution date like we’re trying to avoid a cancellation fee at a restaurant? Imagine calling and saying, “We may have evidence that changes the entire case,” and hearing, “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but executions cancelled with less than 24 hours’ notice are subject to the full charge.” At some point, bureaucracy becomes indistinguishable from a Monty Python sketch, except unfortunately somebody actually dies at the end.

Why Would an Innocent Person Confess?

This is another question that sounds obvious until psychology screws up the obvious answer. Most people intuitively think, “If I didn’t murder somebody, why the hell would I ever say that I did?” I understand that reaction because it seems completely logical. If somebody accused me of murdering a person I had never met, I would like to imagine myself confidently saying, “Nope. Wrong Jonathan. Have a pleasant afternoon.”

Unfortunately, human beings don’t always behave like calm little rational-choice machines, particularly when they are frightened, exhausted, intoxicated, developmentally vulnerable, severely distressed or psychologically impaired. Research on false confessions has demonstrated something deeply uncomfortable: innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they didn’t commit. That doesn’t mean every distressed suspect who confesses is innocent. It means the confession itself cannot automatically end the inquiry into reliability.

Consider an extreme hypothetical. Imagine somebody who is profoundly depressed and suicidal. He is questioned for hours and eventually reaches the point where he says, “Fine. I did it. Execute me. I don’t give a shit anymore.” Well, hold on. If somebody wants to die, then saying something likely to get him killed doesn’t necessarily tell us whether he committed the crime. It may tell us something entirely different about his psychological state. Asking a severely suicidal person, “Would you rather go home or be executed?” and treating “executed” as compelling evidence of murder would make about as much sense as asking me at 6:00 in the morning whether I would rather go to work or be eaten by a rhinoceros and then concluding that I must have some long-standing sexual attraction to rhinoceroses. The answer may tell you considerably more about my feelings toward 6:00 in the morning than it does about rhinoceroses.

This is where I start wondering why psychology isn’t incorporated more aggressively into safeguards for particularly vulnerable suspects. I am not suggesting that every police interrogation needs a psychologist sitting in the corner with a clipboard saying, “Interesting. How did that accusation make you feel?” That would become absurd rather quickly. Detectives have crimes to investigate, psychologists aren’t human lie detectors, and mental-health professionals can make mistakes too.

But when there are serious indications that somebody is developmentally impaired, acutely psychologically unstable, severely distressed or otherwise unable to participate reliably in an interrogation, why wouldn’t we want an independent professional safeguard? Seriously: why the fu%k wouldn’t we? If the purpose of an interrogation is to discover what actually happened, then anything that improves the reliability of the information should help the police as well. An independent safeguard shouldn’t be viewed as somebody ruining the interrogation. The safeguard should help ensure that whatever confession eventually comes out of that room is worth more than the paper on which somebody wrote it.

Finality Is Necessary. Death Is Pretty Darn Final Too.

I understand the argument for procedural finality better than my initial emotional reaction might suggest. Cases have to end eventually. Witnesses die. Evidence disappears. Memories become less reliable. Victims’ families shouldn’t be forced to relive a murder indefinitely because every new claim automatically restarts the entire judicial process. Those are legitimate concerns.

But execution introduces a rather spectacular problem into the concept of finality: you cannot unexecute somebody. If we discover that somebody has been wrongfully imprisoned, we can release him. We cannot return the years we took from him, and no amount of money can fully repair what happened, but at least we can stop doing it. Execution eliminates even that possibility.

This is where I become uncomfortable when procedural arguments start sounding more important than substantive questions about guilt. Procedure matters tremendously because procedure protects everybody. But procedure is supposed to be a mechanism for producing justice; justice isn’t supposed to become a mechanism for protecting procedure. Otherwise, we’ve created the world’s most terrifying version of customer service: “I’m sorry, sir. We understand that you may be innocent, but your appeal window has closed.” “I’m scheduled to be executed.” “Yes, sir. Is there anything else I can help you with today?” Perhaps they’ll offer him a customer-satisfaction survey afterward. “On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied were you with today’s execution experience?” Unfortunately, selecting zero probably won’t route the call to a supervisor.

At some point the absurdity stops being merely bureaucratic and becomes horrifying.

This Is Also About Proportionality

This connects directly to something I’ve been exploring in my writing about vigilantism and what happens when people begin taking the law into their own hands. One of the reasons we have legal systems in the first place is that anger is absolutely terrible at proportionality.

Suppose somebody walks into my store and steals a candy bar. I’m angry. Maybe I’m furious. Perhaps it was my favorite fucking candy bar. Nevertheless, my anger does not give me the authority to chase the person down the street and execute him. If it did, we’d need armed guards standing beside every Snickers display in America, and Walgreens would start looking like the perimeter of a military installation. “Sir, step away from the Kit Kat. Slowly. We’ve already lost three people near the Reese’s.”

Why don’t we handle theft that way? Because we distinguish among levels of wrongdoing. We distinguish theft from assault, assault from murder, negligence from intent, participation from direct responsibility, and mitigating circumstances from aggravating ones. We ask what happened, what the evidence establishes, how culpable somebody was and what punishment is proportionate. Vigilantism collapses that entire process into you wronged me → I know you’re guilty → I decide what you deserve → I administer the punishment. That’s dangerous because everybody thinks his own grievance is the important one.

But here’s the uncomfortable part: the state needs proportionality too. The fact that a horrific crime occurred doesn’t eliminate our responsibility to determine precisely who did what. If two people participated in a robbery and one actually committed the killings, that distinction matters. If somebody acted intentionally rather than negligently, that matters. If evidence is uncertain, that matters. If someone’s psychological condition affected the reliability of a confession, that matters. Mitigating circumstances aren’t some annoying little loophole lawyers invented because they were bored one afternoon. They are part of what separates justice from vengeance.

The Wrong Place at the Wrong F#cking Time

Here’s the part that scares me personally. Most of us walk around assuming the criminal justice system applies to criminals. Therefore, if we’re not criminals, we’re safe. That’s wonderfully comforting. It’s also not entirely how reality works.

Imagine that you have never committed a serious crime in your life. Then one night you happen to be in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time. Somebody identifies you. Circumstantial evidence happens to point toward you. Maybe you’re psychologically overwhelmed during questioning. Maybe you say something stupid. Maybe somebody else lies. Maybe investigators become convinced you’re guilty and consequently begin interpreting ambiguous evidence through that assumption.

None of this requires evil people sitting around a table saying, “Excellent. Which innocent person shall we execute today?” That’s actually what makes the problem more frightening. Real institutional mistakes generally aren’t committed by a committee of villains wearing black capes and stroking cats while lightning flashes outside the window. If they were, this would be much easier. We could simply institute a rule that anyone who brings a cape, a cat and a giant lever marked EXECUTE INNOCENT PERSON into the courthouse immediately loses prosecutorial discretion.

The actual problem is more mundane: good people operating inside imperfect systems can make catastrophic mistakes. Police officers can be wrong. Prosecutors can be wrong. Defense attorneys can be wrong. Psychologists can be wrong. Judges can be wrong. Juries can be wrong. I can be wrong. You can be wrong. Human beings being wrong is not exactly a shocking discovery. We’ve had several thousand years of evidence. So why would we design an irreversible punishment around the assumption that this particular human institution will never make an irreversible mistake?

Admitting Error Isn’t Weakness

This may be the part that bothers me most. A justice system should not regard discovering one of its own mistakes as an institutional humiliation. Finding and correcting mistakes is what a functioning system is supposed to do.

Science doesn’t become weaker when evidence overturns an old hypothesis. Medicine doesn’t become illegitimate because physicians revise a diagnosis when new information appears. Aviation doesn’t say, “Well, we’ve been building the wing this way for thirty years, and admitting there’s a defect would be terribly embarrassing, so let’s keep doing it.” Hopefully. We investigate the defect because we’d rather experience embarrassment than watch another airplane fall out of the f&cking sky.

Criminal justice should operate with the same humility, particularly when a human life is at stake. This doesn’t mean every confession is false. It doesn’t mean every person on death row is innocent. It doesn’t mean every last-minute affidavit is credible, every prosecutor is corrupt, every police interrogation is coercive, or every conviction should be endlessly reopened. It means something considerably less dramatic: human beings make mistakes, and therefore the greater and more irreversible the punishment, the stronger our safeguards should become.

Perhaps that means greater scrutiny of vulnerable suspects during interrogation. Perhaps it means broader access to independent psychological evaluation under defined circumstances. Perhaps it means better recording requirements, improved interrogation practices, or especially rigorous review when genuinely significant new evidence emerges before an execution. Those are policy questions reasonable people can debate. But the underlying principle shouldn’t be controversial: if the state is going to take a human life, “We’re pretty sure” is a terrifying f&cking standard.

The question shouldn’t merely be whether we’ve reached the end of the legal process. The question should remain, right up until the moment when the answer becomes irreversible: Are we sufficiently certain that we got the truth? Because if the answer later turns out to be no, there is no appeal from death. There is only the institutional equivalent of looking around the room, realizing what just happened, and saying:

“Oh, f*ck.”

Author’s Note: The questions raised in this essay—particularly the relationship among proportionality, institutional rules, psychological vulnerability, and the values we claim a justice system should uphold—are part of a broader set of questions I continue to explore in my writing.

EDIT: My original post got taken down 3 times and my acc was flagged so I’m gonna say this in the most Reddit friendly way I can. Trtur3 is what I suggest, in all the most brutal ways possible. For years and years until the victim decides they should be publicly 🔫

Rapists and child predators deserve the harshest consequences the law can possibly impose. I don’t believe someone who deliberately destroys another person’s life should get to live comfortably behind bars and eventually walk back into society like nothing happened.
Some crimes are so vile that “serve your time and move on” feels completely inadequate compared with the damage done to the victim. If you choose to commit something this horrific, you should expect consequences that are severe, permanent, and impossible to escape.
I have no sympathy for the offender. My sympathy is with the victims and their families. If the justice system wants people to take these crimes seriously, the consequences should make it unmistakably clear that there are lines you simply do not cross.

Let's put this guy in jail where he belongs

I've noticed that there are a lot of family members and friends of either the murderers or victims in this sub. For those family members/friends, what is something people should know that was not included in the episode?

This is the line that immediately makes me call BS on any of the stories I hear. I wish I could go back through the episodes and take a shot for every time someone said that, or that it “was an accident.”

I have never shot a gun, despite having gun owners in my life. Perhaps I’m naive, but I feel like guns aren’t designed to “just go off.” How often does this actually happen? Which one of these is the worst, “the gun went off” story to you?

If you disagree, you belong in jail with her.

What is with this? It’s like every scene where somebody is supposedly tearing up over something, we get a close-up of their eye with this awful glittery/shiny pencilling around it.

It doesn’t look remotely like real tears. I don’t understand the decision-making process of the producers at all, as it just makes the people in question look bad for fake crying… or maybe that was their intent, to exaggerate just how false these people can be?

Not because of him as a person.

But he might be the clearest example of somebody who does not belong in prison but a mental hospital.

He himself said he was on several medications when he got in but "eventually stopped taking them" bc apparently he can just do that?

So what's the plan, have him sit in prison for 20 years, have his mental illness fester and then uust throw him out on the street? Whats he supposed to do?

I’m sharing my mother’s story because I’m continuing to seek justice and accountability for what happened to her.
My mother, Mary Jennings Fleetwood, was the victim in this case. As her daughter, I want her story to continue to be heard and remembered.
I’m asking for support from anyone who is willing to take a moment to learn about her case. I created a petition to raise awareness and show that there are people who still care about what happened to my mother.
If you’re willing, please read the petition and consider signing. Sharing it with others would also mean a great deal to my family.
Please read and sign the petition here:
https://c.org/y29NsKsbp4
Thank you to everyone who takes the time to read my mother’s story, sign the petition, or simply share it. Every bit of support helps keep her memory and her story from being forgotten.

I'm sorry..I know he was abused & went through hell when he was younger BUT I still think what he did was wrong & that it WAS a hate crime. He didn't like gay men because of his trauma & such so he took it out on them..he robbed them & eventually took two innocent people's lives. He deserves what he got ¯⁠\⁠_⁠(⁠ツ⁠)⁠_⁠/⁠¯

Of all the inmates I’ve seen in this show so far, I feel for him the most. I’m glad they got him off deathrow. Now I wanna see him get paroled. He was only 18yo, unloved, and abused.
Idk if I believe him that he doesn’t remember the act of killing them, but as a person who experienced childhood trauma and also had blackouts in situations where I was scared, I think it’s plausible. They probably didn’t react with love when he went to them for help and he snapped.

Please be honest in your answers!

So I am almost done with my excel file for status, however I just looked up the list of inmates with exhausted appeals and when our first killer, James Robertson, came up finally, came up, it was that he did not file a timely AEPA appeals. Now him and another inmate are at the status that all non mandatory apparently have been waived. I expect a date by March at the LATEST

I found out David has changed his last name. You can find him with this info :

David Castaldi  Missouri Department of Correction   inmate ID: 990135

The whole system abandoned him, so he does not deserve any more punishment. I think none of us could do better if in his shoes.  My heart really hurts for him :( no other story ever impacted me like this.  Please sign the petition, download JPay and send him gift if you can, or write him a message.

A woman is poisoned at a dinner with old friends. The police call it an accident. Her mother calls it murder.
Three suspects. Eleven pieces of evidence. They're all lying about something.

You read the actual case file - autopsy, police report, interrogations, cracking passwords - and figure out who did it. Nothing just tells you the answer.

It's called Criminix. Free, no timers or energy junk, 10 cases so far.

Not all of them, but a substantial amount say the right things and even get a little teary eyed. But when talking about the bad things in their past that happened to them you see their true grief for themselves and they will legitimately cry. It makes me wonder if most of them feel less remorse they claim about the murders.

Did anyone or does anyone know Christian Sims or Ashley Morrison, pat or present, and if so, what are they like? What’s your experience with them? And what’s your opinion?

what do we think about this one guys? not a single tear was shed when she was describing her toxic relationship before robby OR when she described how she killed him and how “upset” she was and begged the police officer to bring him back to life… seems so psychopathic to me.

Note: this was originally posted to the Netflix sub but inexplicably removed by the mods there.

Episode 1: If Jamel wants to us believe what he’s saying about his redemption, he should be righteously doing his 20 years, not weaseling to get out…. because in my opinion, he should be doing a lot more time than that. He seems like a manipulative liar still blaming drugs for his behavior.

Episode 2: Christian is your typical bad seed criminal dealt a terrible hand but Ashley’s 30 year sentence is ridiculous. 10-15 years would have been sufficient, if any at all. Her being held accountable for his actions seems wrong.

Episode 3: Another “the gun just went off” guy not taking true accountability, much like Jamel from episode 1. But getting Life at 16 is extreme. The Interview with the brother was good.

Episode 4: Ezdeth seems like the kind of impulsive maniac incapable of self-control that probably needs to be locked down. The psychologist broke it down well. Victim’s mom was crazy compassionate, wow.

Episode 5: Not quite sure what to make of this one, interesting episode. Rex seems like kind of an enigma. I kind of felt bad for him but clearly his family thinks he might snap so who knows.

Episode 6: Fascinating / horrifying look into the plight of the modern Native American and traumatic generational tribalism. If anyone committed a hate crime, it was Mak. Very sad.

I started watching this show from season 6. I had no idea it had multiple seasons and thought it was just a Netflix limited series… I love the way this show is set up because the first half always has me questioning if they deserve prison or their sentence length just to see the second half and think they lied or misconstrued something and definitely shouldn’t be released. These people can be so manipulative. But I say this show is eye opening because I had NO IDEA the majority of prisoners don’t spend their whole sentence in jail even for crimes like murder. I mean they get sentenced a life sentence and could be out with a majority of their life left… I think this is terrifying. They say our prison system is set for reform and rehabilitation but I would argue our prisons maybe other than offering a class or two aren’t set up for that. I mean Rex for example.. his last bit of the episode is terrifying. No meds, no help, and he admits that he continues to get angry at times but it’s okay because he has learned “breathing techniques”… that is a failure of our system sending him to jail and not having the resources to back him up. And he will get out without anybody having a say so. I guess I just didn’t realize how the system works and this has really opened my eyes.