[BluffTHIS!]

I have somewhat of a problem with the article because it starts out advocating a higher bar for imposing the death penalty on a convicted murderer, and then also advocates lowering the bar for standards of conviction in the first place. To my mind these are two separate issues.

Regarding the second and more important one as far as releasing possbile guilty perpertrators, we already have a jury system where all 12 jurors must agree that a conviction is justified beyond a reasonable doubt. A far higher standard than that used in civil suits. Plus there is the practical issue of the average intelligence and logical reasoning ability of jurors, which the OJ trial showed isn't very high (this of course cuts both ways).

So I probably am unwilling to change the conviction standard. However, I am more than willing to change the standard for imposing the death penalty so that it is seen to be used only in cases where there is virtual certainty that the conviction was correct. Such a standard might be either the testimony of 2 or more disinterested witnessess (or video evidence) or conclusive DNA evidence (micro-fibers now won't cut it).

Another approach is simply to narrow sharply the cases in which the penalty can be used, such as with those convicted of 2+ separate occasion murders, terroristic mass murder, espionage which leads to the death of government operatives, murder of witnesses, and posssibly for political reasons, the murder of law enforcement officers but which meets the above higher death penalty standards of DNA evidence or multiple witnesses/video evidence.

I think that it would well nigh impossible to convince our citizens to agree to a tougher conviction standard since the unanimous jury reasonable doubt standard has been followed to my knowledge for the entire history of the US, and is also partially enshrined in English common law from which our legal system derives a great deal.

On the subject of such initiatives originating here, I think that is a great idea, because the collective logical thinking of poker players here who have diverse backgrounds can be no worse than the position papers of supposedly elite think tanks of the left or right. And it would show that poker players do in fact contribute to society beyond simply making money and paying taxes.