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Hello and welcome to Morales.

We're your weekly guide to the numbers all around us, and I'm Tim Halfard.

Our email address is Morales at bbc.co.uk, and that is how loyal listener James Middleton

reached us with this question about a claim made on the BBC Radio 4 programme

that's at Island Disks.

Dear Morales, in a recent weather Island Disks episode with the lawyer Brian Stevens

and he claimed that.

For every nine people that we have executed in America,

we've identified one innocent person on death row.

Having never really questioned the use of the death penalty in the States,

a statistic has really shocked me into reconsidering my views.

Is this figure accurate?

Absolutely.

This is Frank R. Baumgartner.

He's professor of political science at the University of North Carolina

at Chapel Hill in the United States.

In our country in the modern period from 1976 when the death penalty was reinstated

by the Supreme Court, so since then there's been 152 people exonerated,

...