A preliminary report of the Grassroots Investigation...

A preliminary report of the Grassroots Investigation Project of Equal Justice USA highlights the cases of 16 individuals who were executed despite evidence of their innocence. The ''Reasonable Doubts'' report by the Quixote Center was based on five months of research into legal and police documents in cases from Alabama, California, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, Texas and Virginia. The report focuses on the inadequacies in the justice system that led to their executions, including ineffective counsel, police and prosecutorial misconduct, racial bias, and failure of the courts to intervene in cases with compelling evidence of innocence. Four of those executions occurred in Texas under Gov. George W. Bush, the Republican nominee for president. Bush has said he doesn't believe an innocent person has been executed in Texas during his administration. In each of the 16 cases, all of which involved murder convictions, ''there exists compelling evidence that the defendant was convicted of the crime he did not, in fact, commit,'' the study's author, Claudia Whitman, wrote.