Utah’s conservative state Senate recently voted to abolish the death penalty. The action reflects a growing bipartisan recognition of the documented flaws of the death penalty, including its high cost, decades-long appeals and faulty lethal injection protocols.

To get the measure through the Republican-led House, Utah legislators might point to another reason to abolish capital punishment, one counterintuitively illustrated in the recent executions of a Texas serial killer and an Oklahoma gangbanger: State executions of the guilty sometimes impede exoneration of the innocent.

A case in Texas

Rodney Lincoln was convicted in 1982 of murdering JoAnn Tate and violently assaulting her two young daughters. The crime scene was bloody and brutal, but the evidence against Lincoln was tenuous. There was a shaky hair analysis, a smattering of other physical evidence and little else. Except, that is, for the testimony of Tate’s eight-year-old daughter, Melissa Davis, who survived the attack.

Davis picked Lincoln out of a lineup and identified him as the murderer at trial. Largely on the strength of that single identification, Lincoln was convicted and sentenced to two life terms. Despite DNA tests on the hair evidence that found no match to Lincoln, Lincoln remains in prison. But 33 years later, Davis (not her present name) no longer believes that Lincoln was the man who killed her mother. After watching a true crime show about her case, Davis realized that convicted serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells was the real killer.

Tommy Lynn Sells was one of the most notorious, and lethal, serial killers in U.S. history. He is believed to have murdered scores of people, and has personally claimed responsibility for as many as 70 killings across the country, including a family of four only 80 miles from the Tate/Davis home. Details from the gruesome crime scene are eerily similar to those found in other killings committed by Sells.