Capital Punishment and the Quran

In 1982, Nick Yarris was convicted of the rape and murder of Linda Mae Craig. He was sentenced to death and was sent to death row where he awaited his execution date. Two decades into his sentence he sent a petition to the Pennsylvania Courts asking for all his appeals to cease and for this sentence of death to be carried out. But before this occurred, in 2003, DNA evidence proved that he had not committed the crime, and in 2004 he was released after spending 22 years in prison; 14 of those years in solitary confinement.

The institution that helped exonerate Nick Yarris was the Innocence Project who, as of January 2020, has documented over 365 DNA exonerations in the United States. Twenty-one of these exonerees had previously been sentenced to death. In 2014, The National Academy of Sciences released a report where they estimated that statistically that at least 4.1 percent of defendants sentenced to death in the United States are innocent. This means that the United States is accepting that it is tolerable to kill one innocent person in order to bring 25 guilty people to justice via capital punishment.

Throughout history individuals have debated the question regarding how many innocent lives are worth being lost in order to maintain the rightful killing of guilty individuals via capital punishment.

In the 12th century, Jewish legal theorist Maimonides wrote that “the Exalted One has shut this door” against the use of presumptive evidence, for “it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent one to death.”