Jackson Free Press

"The individual who was subject to the death penalty had committed heinous crimes, terrible crimes. And I've said in the past that there are certain circumstances in which a crime is so terrible that the application of the death penalty may be appropriate—mass killings, the killings of children."

—President Barack Obama speaking on a recent botched execution in Oklahoma that raised questions about how the death penalty is applied in the U.S.

Why it stinks: As of October 2013, there were 3,088 people on death row in the United States (48 here in Mississippi, which has the second-highest incarceration rate in the nation). A significant number of them were not convicted of mass killings or of killing children. In a lot of cases, those convictions resulted from sloppy trials, presided over by elected judges with a political motivation to throw the book at defendants whenever possible with cherry-picked juries. For evidence of that, consider the cases of Michelle Byrom and Willie Jerome Manning, two people recently scheduled to be executed in Mississippi before significant procedural problems with their convictions came to light. But Obama, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient and constitutional law expert, has been reticent about questioning the deep and wide problems that exist in the American justice system, but such a discussion is probably appropriate.