Early in March 2021, Isaiah Andrews walked out of an Ohio prison after 45 years behind bars when a judge threw out his 1974 conviction in the killing of his wife. Andrews simply did not do it.

We talk often about horrific killings, but we tend to ignore the corruption and the injustices that send innocent men to prison. Andrews is hardly the lone person in such circumstances.

What about The Central Park Five?

What about The Norfolk Four?

What about Kwame Ajamu or Joe D’Ambrosio?

Ajamu and D’Ambrosio are Clevelanders, convicted on the filmiest of evidence for no other reason than police corruption or malfeasance. Both men — one Black, one white — were fortunate; they never heard the executioner’s song.

In 2023, 153 people were exonerated across the United States; many were serving life sentences. Too many of them were Black or Hispanic. Almost all were poor.

We should not traffic in wrongful convictions, and since we make so many mistakes, we need to step back and look at the legal system we have in place. Of course, no one favors more crime, but no one favors sending a man to prison for a crime he did not commit.

As Benjamin Franklin, one the republic’s founding fathers, once put it: “It is better a hundred guilty persons should escape than one innocent person should suffer.”

Franklin was right in the 1700s; and he’s just as right in the 2020s.

Yet time and time we hear about another “innocent person” who has walked free because the legal system wronged him. He went to a courtroom looking for justice, and he left it with injustice.

In a February 2025 article, a Cincinnati website put the number of Ohioans exonerated at 42 and continuing. Several went to prison with much public ado; most left with not even a headline to announce their return to the free world.

You would be a fool to think that 42 is the final count. Our legal system is not about finding the perps but convicting people. We ask for law and order; we were willing to accept law and disorder.

For just as a society gets the government it deserves, it gets the court and cops it deserves, too. If a society cares not a bit about corrupt cops, overzealous prosecutors or hanging judges, it should never be aghast when men like Andrews, Ajamu and D’Ambrosio land in its prisons.

So if we cannot trust our system to get verdicts right, can we then trust it to get sentences right?

You get no do-overs when a man is executed. “Sorry” won’t make it right; nor will millions paid to his family.

In my travels, a woman from England once asked me and several other Americans did our particular states have the death penalty. A couple from Minnesota said theirs did not; two women from Illinois said the death penalty there was on hold; as the reluctant spokesperson for Ohio, I told the woman the state still had the death penalty in place.

She did not seem overly surprised. For people around the world know Americans are overly quick to punish — and then punish overly harsh.

No punishment is harsher than killing a man, though robbing men like Andrews of decades of their lives is nothing to applaud either.