so "death row" is a label with no other information attached?

I grew up living with a chaplain who worked death row at a large prison, so I have considerable hands-on experience interacting with death-row inmates, and no, the label "death row" does not provide enough information for judgement.

This makes sense given your affinity for dynamically typed languages.

Please review the Hacker News contributor guidelines.

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> Eschew flamebait.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

has anyone earned that label but later been found not guilty?

Well, that's the problem with the death penalty in the face of our current legal system.

The prison I mentioned was majority black. I knew a man personally who had been in prison for over 40 years, since his early 20s. He wasn't on death row, but he spent his entire life in prison for a murder he maintained he never committed. I believed him.

One day in this man's late 60s, another man at the prison who was on death row was executed. At his execution, he confessed to another murder... the same one that the first man had been charged with. It took 40 years for this poor man to be exonerated, because he was locked up in a time where being black was enough to get the book thrown at you. If he was on death row, he wouldn't have gotten 40 years to prove his innocence.

But the best part? The prison warden maneuvered to gum the process up with as much paperwork as possible, and this man died in prison as a free man.