There is no way to know with absolute certainty that a trial involving the death penalty will have an accurate and fair verdict every time. In fact, a study conducted by James S. Liebman and Jeffery Fagan at Columbia University Law School revealed that “two-thirds of all capital trials contained serious errors” (Innocence). Furthermore, when the cases were retried, over 80% did not receive a death sentence, and a small percentage were completely acquitted (Innocence). The reasonable alternative punishment for a convicted murderer is life in prison without the possibility of parole. This ensures that the violent criminal is permanently removed from society, but if new evidence or technology were to emerge proving his or her innocence, the convicted person would still be alive to see the situation resolved, which would not be possible if he or she had been wrongly executed. This has occurred 151 times since 1973 (Amnesty USA). A particularly vivid case, and one of the most recent, is that of two mentally disabled brothers, Henry McCollum and Leon Brown. Both men were convicted of rape and murder in 1983 based on confessions that they later recanted, saying they were coerced. Brown was sentenced to life in prison while McCollum was sentenced to death. They were 15 and 19 years old respectively when they were tried and convicted, and 30 years later, in 2014, they were exonerated in light of new DNA evidence linking an entirely different man to the crime for which they had spent decades in prison (Katz and Eckholm). . The possibility that all these people were killed for crimes they did not commit is terrible and is proof that this irrevocable punishment should not be a punishment