Not fictional enough

Summary 

John Grisham's latest
legal thriller

The novel The Guardians tells the story of a small law firm working to free convicted murderers who are innocent. John Grisham's story opens with lawyer Cullen Post meeting with a client, who has to rush his last steak before the prison finds out they can't kill him that night. The main story follows the Guardians using their limited resources to overturn Quincy Miller's murder conviction from more than 20 years ago, when the black man was framed by a corrupt sheriff working with drug gangs. Post's team have to persuade old witnesses to admit the lies they had previously told in court, uncover new evidence hidden in a "haunted" house, and avoid the vicious drug gangs still operating.

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Response 

As usual, my first draft of the summary was much too long. It was 140 words, and I had to make about six revisions to get it down to the allowed word limit of no more than 120. Summarizing takes some time as you decided what is important enough to be included and what has to be cut. The latest novel by John Grisham, which I read over the last couple of days, is 375 pages, which is normal for one of his legal thrillers, and getting that down to 120 words or less isn't easy. But I'm happy with the current 119-word summary above. The most important starting point is that you know the source you are summarizing very well, which is why I asked you to choose a favourite story: if it's one of your favourite stories, I'm assuming that you already know it very well, so will not need to do any research by reading the book or watching the film again. And of course, your reaponse has to be your own personal response, so you can't do any research for that: no one else can tell you what your response to something is. 

As I was reading the novel, which is based on a couple of true stories about failures in the American legal system, I was reminded of an article in the BBC News a week ago. That article on the BBC News, "Maryland trio set free after being wrongfully jailed for 36 years," published on November 26, tells us that the three innocent young men, black men, were convicted because the police used "coaching and coercion of other teenage witnesses to make their case," which is very similar to the criminal activity of the police and state prosecutors in Grisham's story. As Grisham, who is a qualified lawyer, explains at the end of his book, although his novel is a work of fiction, it is based on real cases, and the BBC News article reports other cases where the legal system has committed great injustice, including death row cases where someone legally convicted of a serious crime has been proved innocent, often as a result of modern DNA testing, which also plays an important role in Grisham's fictional story. 

These things make me wonder how many other innocent people are in prison, or have been killed by the court system, when they were in fact innocent. Perhaps we need to be less trusting of police and courts than we are, since we know that that do make mistakes, even in the US, where legal protection for people accused of a crime is relatively strong. But I also wonder whether some things should even be crimes. In some countries, drinking alcohol is illegal because, but if someone uses that popular drug and does not harm anyone else, have they really committed a crime that can be justly punished? Or is the law itself unjust? 

More recently in Thailand, I read a couple of days ago that the parents of a young teacher who was murdered want her killer to be killed by the courts. Should the courts ever do that, however sure we might be that the real killer has been found? 
 

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Question

Should the death penalty ever be used as punishment for a crime?