People in the commonwealth are asking what went wrong with the capital-justice system that permitted a completely innocent man to be convicted and come within nine days of execution. This trial will answer that question.
But more importantly, 90 percent of cases don't even involve biological evidence. And what that tells us is there are obviously tens of thousands of innocent people currently languishing in prisons in the United States.
The real issue is not whether one man was in fact guilty or innocent, it's rather that he set the example for what the other 49 governors should do on the hundreds of cases where DNA material still exists from people who have been executed.