I recently penned an op-ed in the Chattanooga Times Free Press detailing my experiences at Justice Day on the Hill in Nashville, Tennessee, which is an annual event at the capitol hosted by Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. I had the opportunity to speak with Representative McManus, among many others. The op-ed states:
As a fiscal conservative, Representative McManus understands that Tennessee is experiencing the same problems as other states with the death penalty, and we discussed the exorbitant costs of capital punishment.
Rep. McManus, like a growing number of Republicans around the country, told me of his concerns about the possibility of executing an innocent person and how Tennessee’s death penalty system gets it wrong sometimes. He pointed to the case of Paul House, who spent nearly 23 years on Tennessee’s death row before all charges against him were dropped in 2009.
It goes on to say:
The time has come to re-examine capital punishment from a conservative perspective, in terms of the waste of tax dollars, the risk of executing innocent people and the system’s negative impact on victims’ families.
