181
Tommy Lee Walker, the Black Dallas Man Executed for 1954 Murder, Declared Innocent
(www.dallasobserver.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2026
181 points (100.0% liked)
News
34363 readers
2945 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This is why there shouldn't be capital punishment.
The tradeoff people make who support the death penalty which is unspoken is: "it's worth killing a few innocent people as long as we kill the guilty too." And it's so fucked up. My parents hear me explain this and literally have no reaction. They cannot even engage with the idea that innocent people being murdered by the state is a horror that cannot be accepted. It's just the cost of "justice" for them, apparently.
That's such a weird thing to say, as well, because when innocent people are being killed by the state there is no justice. I often wonder if people even think about what they're saying, or if they're just regurgitating shit they heard somewhere.
The cost of justice is... injustice? Make it make sense.
You'd be surprised how many people I've talked to who think that if someone was picked up by the cops they were doing something to deserve it.
It's staggering how many people blame the victim for the police being incompetent.
Ah, the "if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear"-people. They're a fun bunch indeed.
What they're really saying is they think any injustice there (which they refuse to think about) is worth it. They probably rationalize it by saying to themselves that innocent people being executed is a super rare thing. But it's not. I'd guess it's as high as 30%. But that's admittedly a total guess.
In the end though, to support the death penalty, you have to intentionally refuse to think "what if the courts were wrong?"
You're right. But it seems worse than that somehow. I've seen many people say they support the death penalty because it keeps other people safe, to "remove" murderers from society and such. But it's so disingenuous.
We can already remove dangers from our society, in less.. final ways. We can lock them up, or have them admitted to institutions in cases of mental health issues. We can rehabilitate them whenever possible, which also removes the danger.
But no, that's not good enough. These people think they absolutely have to die. They want other people to be murdered by the state. They want it so much that they are willing to sacrifice a bunch of innocent people to satisfy their own bloodlust.
It's worse than ignoring it, it's actively seeking it out for their murderous desires.
I totally agree. If there was a way we could be absolutely certain of guilt, I would support it in some limited cases. But that's absolutely impossible. There's always planting evidence, etc. So it is indefensible.
You are absolutely right!
According to the NIH it's 4.1%, although they admit it's a conservative estimate.
Not that it changes the message, I was just curious if anyone had done the math.
Doing some napkin math, with 1654 executions having taken place since 1970, that means that at least 68 innocent people have been murdered by the state.
Holy fuck that's nearly 1/20. That's a wildly unacceptable margin of error. Hell it's an unacceptable margin of error for a long term prison sentence
Reverse Blackstone’s ratio.
Yeah, pretty much. Pretty awful.
When an innocent person is killed, even if you mistakenly thought they really really deserved it, that's murder. What do we do with murderers? We kill them. But if one supports a system that murders, they become party to that murder. I'm not keen on being a part of a murder system, no matter how occasional.
Alternatively, to appeal to the selfish, if one is willing to allow a few innocents to die for a broken system to function, they they'd better be okay with being one of those innocents.
Either way, I don't trust the state to decide who lives and dies.
Let's get even more selfish. Executions cost the state more than life in prison. Financially it's a stupid thing to do.
The problem with that argument is execution states are trying to cheap out over it. They'd love to get rid of the extra appeals capital cases get
Honestly there are so fucking many reasons against it. I can respect it as a penalty in international law, but for criminal law it's nuts. It's obviously cruel and unusual punishment (as is solitary). It gets overturned post mortem regularly. Increasingly they're just killing people despite reasonable doubt being found. It's a stain on our collective souls. It's wildly expensive. And it's ineffective as a deterrent.