To the actual point - I do think there's a difference between inmates dying in prison for other reasons (and we should reduce those) vs. sentencing someone to execution for a crime they didn't commit.
My point is that there's more "bang for the buck" wrt saving innocents from being dying due to wrongful "not death penalty" convictions, even if you discount "dying in the infirmary" quite a bit relative to "dying in the chair."
I'm not saying that you shouldn't care about the death penalty.
My comment is addressed to people who care about dying due to wrongful conviction.
If the system doesn’t care when an innocent is actually sentenced to death and executed, why would it care if they die at all?
I don’t think there is any predictable “bang for the buck”.
If anything, more “bang” is achieved by shaming the system towards better justice wherever it will be most publicly noticed.
Creating a halo for more change.
The case’s dramatic factors are why people put up their own resources into fighting it, and why we are hearing about it. And why the challenge has any chance.
No one cares, because they die in the prison infirmary, but they're just as dead and they were killed because of their conviction, just like they were executed. (No, I'm not talking about folks on death row, although innocents on death row also die in the infirmary.)
Not only do we kill more innocents that way in absolute numbers, it's also greater in percentage numbers. (Death penalty cases get lots of review. We can argue about whether it's enough, but it's far more review than life without parole, not to mention lesser sentences which end up being life.)