A new report out of Tennessee documents the state of the death penalty system in the Volunteer State, and it doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Tennessee, which just this month executed its first person in nearly a decade, has a track record fraught with mistakes including three exonerations and a staggering rate of death sentences reversed or vacated by the courts due to issues such as ineffective assistance of counsel, prosecutorial misconduct, and innocence. In fact, of the 192 individuals that the state has sentenced to death since 1977, over half (106) have seen their sentences or convictions vacated. In addition to the glaring innocence issues within the death penalty, the report provides ample evidence that the state’s system is also overrun with issues of arbitrariness. These same problems are what led to the death penalty being banned in the late 1970’s. In the landmark Supreme Court case, Furman vs. Georgia, the court struck down the constitutionality of the nation’s death penalty system based on evidence that it was applied to “a capriciously selected random handful,” who ended up on death row due to factors such as geography and race, and less becau