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b'David Dow went from a death penalty supporter to founding the Texas Innocence Network and running a death penalty clinic. He has since written a number of books, including \\u201cExecuted on a Technicality.\\u201d\\n\\nThis week on Everyday Injustice, David Dow explains the various injustices within the death penalty system.\\n\\nAs he writes in his book, \\u201cI simply conclude that the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments cannot tolerate the infliction of a sentence of death under legal systems that permit this unique penalty to be so wantonly and so freakishly imposed.\\u201d\\n\\nInstead of punishing the worst and the worst, he found, \\u201cThe ultimate penalty was being consistently applied in a wrongful and arbitrary fashion.\\u201d\\n\\nMoreover the system was making a tremendous amount of errors.\\n\\u201cAccording to Professor James Liebman\\u2019s definitive study of all death penalty cases from 1976 though 1995,13 death row inmates prevailed on their appeals in federal court more than half the time. That is a stunning statistic that bears repeating: In half of all death penalty cases over a twenty-year period, a federal court reversed either the conviction or the sentence or both. In no other area of law are reversals the norm.\\u201d\\n\\nThat changed with the passage of the 1994 Death Penalty law \\u2013 which made appeals much more difficult to sustain, but did not end the problems.'