John Conyers: “The only two points I wanted to bring up is this is not about whether we are for or against the death penalty. This…”

“The only two points I wanted to bring up is this is not about whether we are for or against the death penalty. This amendment is to make sure that, if the court has any doubt that the defendant actually committed the offense, the court would be allowed to suspend the sentence of death and provide a sentence of life imprisonment. And with reference to the gentleman's observation that there is no evidence that any person that has been executed was innocent, it is pretty hard after the execution to ask people to continue to look for evidence that the execution was wrong. We know that they were on death row and we have saved them because the effort and the energies persisted while they were alive. So I would not want the gentleman to conclude from the fact that we have not proven that people executed were in fact innocent turns on the fact that they were in fact guilty. That is a pretty long stretch.”