I am actually a lawyer who has worked in death penalty defense. I had a fellowship for two years in Alabama where I worked at one level or another on the cases of about 48 death row prisoners. I have spoken with several death row inmates, and I have personally met two individuals who were released from death row (after circa 8 years and 18 years, respectively) after their innocence was established. I intend to post something more substantive after I have digested all of the other postings on this forum. However, a quick note here.

No person who has ever been on death row would claim that the experience is equivalent to serving a sentence of life without parole. Death row prisoners are segregated from the general population and typically spend 23 hours per day in individual lockdown. They are not eligible for work opportunities or other programming in the prison. The psychological pressure is intense for obvious reasons. These individuals are not put out of their misery quickly; the average tenure of a death row inmate in prison is twenty years. Some individuals have suggested that, setting aside issues about the punishment itself, the process that death row inmates go through during the appellate and postconviction period (which usually includes the scheduling of many execution dates, with some stays being granted only after the inmate has been prepared for death and is actually connected to the apparatus) is cruel and unusual punishment. Some of our Supreme Court Justices have expressed interest in this argument. Whatever you believe the merits of these issues to be, the statement that there is a practical equivalence between the sentence of life without parole and death is not accurate.