A Texas man who unsuccessfully challenged the safety of the state’s lethal injection drugs and raised questions about evidence used to persuade a jury to sentence him to death for killing an elderly woman decades ago was executed late Tuesday.
Jedidiah Murphy, 48, was pronounced dead after an injection at the state penitentiary in Huntsville for the October 2000 fatal shooting of 80-year-old Bertie Lee Cunningham of the Dallas suburb of Garland. Cunningham was killed during a carjacking.
“To the family of the victim, I sincerely apologize for all of it,” Murphy said while strapped to a gurney in the Texas death chamber and after a Christian pastor, his right hand on Murphy’s chest, prayed for the victim’s family, Murphy’s family and friends and the inmate.
“I hope this helps, if possible, give you closure,” Murphy said.
Regarding #1, “that video was generated by AI” is a broadly applicable objection to video evidence if “that could be a body double” would work.
I agree with you in principle, both that it would have to be an exceptional case and that the evidence would have to be overwhelming. Absolute certainty is tough though.
I wonder if there are alternatives that would work. For example, is it possible to have a case against somebody that does not rely on ANY human being acting in good faith? If you have to rely on some person’s word to build a case, whether it’s a witness or a cop or a priest, that puts it on shaky ground as far as near certainty.
I actually thought about mentioning AI or other tampering with the footage but didn’t want to make my comment even more long-winded than it already was. But suffice it to say the requirements for that would be similarly cartoonishly paranoid with strict rules about how and where it could be stored, who could have access to it under what circumstances, probably going so far as to say that if it had ever been stored on a device that had been exposed to the Internet it couldn’t be used as evidence for a death penalty.
It’s probably a standard that could only be met by only one in a billion cases even if we retooled all of our surveillance systems, body cameras, etc. to try to meet it, and I’m not saying that we should try to because it would probably mean some egregious privacy violations, but if by some miracle the evidence manages to meet that standard then they can begin to consider the death penalty. It should be an incredibly tough, nearly impossible bar to meet.