(July 16, 2014 at 3:49 pm)ShaMan Wrote: Average cost to house an inmate for one year $29,000 (higher for death row inmates)Getting an innocent person to confess: Priceless.
Average prison guard salary per year $42,000 (higher for death row guards)
State paid annual attorney fees for defense per inmate $76,000
One .357 Mag. round $0.48
The relative ease with which a person can be made to confess, and the pressure that can be put on police departments to solve particularly horrible crimes can lead to an apparently air-tight case against an innocent person. Richard Jewell comes to mind as the case of a person who took heroic action and wound up being treated as a villain instead.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
