Juan Luna To Spend Life In Prison

Juan Luna was convicted of the death of 7 people in the Palatine Brown's Chicken Murder case. In the Chicago area, this is a pretty infamous case. Seven people were found slain in the walk-in refrigerator. After the conviction the same 12 jurors had to deliberate over Luna's fate. If all 12 agreed Luna would be sentenced to death. As it turns out, 11 of the 12 voted for the death penalty. There was one hold out; who jurors say was not pressured to change her vote.

All over the news today are people saying justice was not done. Quite the contrary, a man was put on trial, judged by a group of his peers, convicted and sentenced for his crime. That is justice. What these people are complaining about is that they didn't get their revenge. Their bloodlust was not sated.

And I sympathize.

But I disagree.

I've talked of it before but let me bring it up once again. In my mind the BIGGEST problem with the death penalty is the fallibility of the system. According the Innocent Project, 200 people have been exonerated through DNA testing. Some of these people may have been railroaded into jail but probably the most likely scenario is just human error. It has been shown that eye witnesses make mistakes. Various forensic techniques have been proven unreliable and forensic investigators have made errors.

But wait, you say, DNA evidence was used in the Luna case. Surely he is guilty. Yes, I agree with you. But at one time we thought eye witnesses and fingerprints were rock solid proof of guilt. They’re not. Right now, DNA is the best bit of evidence we have. But 5, 10, 20 years from now we might have something better. I don’t know what that is but we can’t rule it out. Maybe it won’t be something different but we will discover that there are more accurate techniques to analyze DNA. Those techniques might exonerate or confirm guilt of people in jail. But if they are not in jail, if they are in a grave yard, then we won’t be able to correct the ultimate miscarriage of justice.