A flawed system

From the front page of the USA Today outside my hotel room door this morning:

Today the 200th person will be exonerated from a crime they did not commit on the basis of DNA evidence and the hard work of the Innocence Project. It took 13 years for the first hundred exonerations but only five for the second, demonstrating that as this national push expands, more wrongful convictions will continue to surface.

How can anyone, after seeing this list of 200 people who have spent decades in prison or even been sentenced to death still argue that our criminal justice system is so reliable that capital punishment should continue in this country? Do they just not care about the mistakes, as long as they aren't victim to one?

I am so glad that we have a group like the Innocence Project out there to help redress some of these injustices, but they can only handle so many cases per year. At some point we need to undertake a more fundamental examination of how and why these incorrect convictions occur and how we can prevent them in the future. For every person with available DNA evidence that could exonerate them, there are probably 2 or 3 more who can't look to the irrefutable proof of DNA. Someone needs to ask these questions for them, too.