Whenever the issue of the death penalty arises, including in Israel, its opponents start screaming about all the "wrongfully convicted and executed" people.  The urban myth of wrongfully executed innocents is one of the most common in the media.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal this week,  judge Morris B. Hoffman (Colorado district court judge and an adjunct 

professor of law at the University of Colorado) takes a serious look at that claim.  It is complete nonsense.

Hoffman observes:

'One of the earliest and most oft-cited works on wrongful convictions was a 1987 study done by Hugo Bedau and Michael Radelet, claiming that 23 of the 350 capital defendants whose cases they examined (including Sacco and Vanzetti) were executed despite their factual innocence. Yet the method by which Mr. Bedau (a philosopher) and Mr. Radelet (a sociologist) determined whether the executed defendants were actually innocent was to reconstruct from the trial record, and contemporaneous newspaper reports, a one-sided narrative from which some doubt about factual guilt might plausibly be argued.  Scholars immediately criticized this methodology, and challenged Messrs. Bedau and Radelet to come up with a single case of a demonstrably innocent person executed in America in the modern era. Messrs. Bedau and Radelet have not only been unable to do so. One of them has recently admitted that their label "innocent" was really just a way of saying there were errors in the trial, that guilt seemed to them to be a "close call," and that some of those close calls must surely, as a statistical matter, have involved some factually innocent people....It is a giant leap from an erroneous trial ruling to reversible error, and another giant leap from reversible error to actual innocence.'

Hoffman goes on to calculate the wrongful post-trial conviction rate in the US as only 0.013%. But since only 5% of cases go to court trial in the US, the overall wrongful conviction rate is around 0.00065%.  And there is no evidence that any wrongfully convicted person was ever executed in the US.

So instead of trying to deal with terrorism through capitulation and appeasement, maybe Israel should try capital punishment!   The entire country was forced into the Oslo debacle under the slogan "Let's give it a try."   So regarding capital punishment, why not give 'Old Sparky' a try?