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ATERRIBLE injustice was done to Ray Krone. In 1992, he was sentenced to death for the murder of Kim Ancona, a Phoenix cocktail waitress. He spent three years on Death Row before his first conviction was overturned. On retrial, he was sentenced to life in prison. All the while, he maintained that he was innocent. Eventually, DNA analysis proved that he was telling the truth: Another man had committed the crime. In April of this year, Krone was freed.

In Washington, D.C., Sen. Russ Feingold marked the occasion. Krone, the Wisconsin Democrat said, was “the hundredth person to be released from Death Row in the modern death-penalty era”—since, that is, the Supreme Court allowed the practice to resume in 1976. “How many innocent Americans today sit in their prison cells wrongly accused, counting down the days until there are no more?” Feingold asked. “There have now been 100 exonerations and 766 executions since the early 1970s. In other words, for every seven to eight Death Row inmates executed by the states or federal government, one has been found innocent and released from Death Row. . . One risk, one error, one mistake, is one too many. But 100 mistakes, proven mistakes, qualifies as a crisis. And a crisis calls for action.” Feingold wants a national moratorium on the death penalty. Failing that, he favors his colleague Patrick Leahy’s Innocence Protection Act, which backers say would improve the administration of the death penalty.

About the Author

Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru is the editor of National Review, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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ATERRIBLE injustice was done to Ray Krone. In 1992, he was sentenced to death for the murder of Kim Ancona, a Phoenix cocktail waitress. He spent three years on Death Row before his first conviction was overturned. On retrial, he was sentenced to life in prison. All the while, he maintained that he was innocent. Eventually, DNA analysis proved that he was telling the truth: Another man had committed the crime. In April of this year, Krone was freed.

In Washington, D.C., Sen. Russ Feingold marked the occasion. Krone, the Wisconsin Democrat said, was “the hundredth person to be released from Death Row in the modern death-penalty era”—since, that is, the Supreme Court allowed the practice to resume in 1976. “How many innocent Americans today sit in their prison cells wrongly accused, counting down the days until there are no more?” Feingold asked. “There have now been 100 exonerations and 766 executions since the early 1970s. In other words, for every seven to eight Death Row inmates executed by the states or federal government, one has been found innocent and released from Death Row. . . One risk, one error, one mistake, is one too many. But 100 mistakes, proven mistakes, qualifies as a crisis. And a crisis calls for action.” Feingold wants a national moratorium on the death penalty. Failing that, he favors his colleague Patrick Leahy’s Innocence Protection Act, which backers say would improve the administration of the death penalty.