Some say an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

But in the American justice system, this mentality can lead to wrongful accusations and innocent individuals paying the ultimate price.

On Monday night in the University Center, the libertarian organization Young Americans for Liberty at UT hosted “To Honor Life: An Evening on the Death Penalty,” an event focused on exposing the deep-seated problems that lie at the heart of capital punishment in the United States.

The event featured a talk by Ray Krone, the 100th death row inmate exonerated in the U.S., on his 10-year struggle in the courts to prove his innocence, as well as a discussion panel with Stacy Rector from Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death penalty and Marc Hyden with Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty.

Convicted of killing a Phoenix bartender in 1991, Krone was sentenced to the death penalty and spent 10 years fighting the court system with evidence of his innocence, including shoe prints smaller than the size of his actual foot and handprints and DNA evidence from the victim’s body that did not match his own.

Despite the evidence in his favor, Krone spent two years on death row and 10 years total in prison after being found guilty twice and refusing to mitigate, or show remorse, for a crime he did not commit.

“How do you mitigate something you didn’t do? How do you show remorse or regret for an act you never committed?” Krone asked the audience.

“They weren’t interested in the truth, folks.”

Krone’s experience is just one story in a prison system that has wrongly sentenced 147 people to death. These examples, Rector said, are convincing people from different areas and political parties to band together against the death penalty.

“There are more and more voices from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives who are now speaking out and who are sharing their concerns about Tennessee’s death penalty, because the evidence continues to mount that the system is too broken for us to fix,” Rector said.

This evidence, Rector explained, includes personal testimonies that demonstrate the fallibility of the courts and the enormous cost of continuing to support the death penalty.

The court processes, Rector explained, take six times longer than the average criminal trial, with appeals that can last for decades and housing for death row inmates that can cost twice as much as general housing.

“So in the end, if you look at what happens in states like North Carolina, you’re going to save yourself several million dollars per case,” Hyden said.

Stories like Krone’s and facts about capital punishment are what initially led Kenny Collins, a junior in political science and member of Young Americans for Liberty, to begin to research and think twice about the death penalty that he once strongly supported.

“I supported it because growing up, you think the death penalty, that’s the right thing to do to people who have done wrong,” Collins said. “Especially here in the South, people expect you to support the death penalty.”

After learning about the innocent people who have been wrongly accused, as well as the failure of the death penalty to deter crime and prevent murder, Collins said that he could no longer justify the use of capital punishment.

“After I did a lot of research, I realized that I couldn’t support it,” Collins said.

Hyden said that capital punishment is contradictory to many tightly-held conservative views, including the importance of pro-life legislation and limited government.

“It’s not pro-life when it risks killing innocent lives, it’s not fiscally responsible because it costs millions more dollars to try to execute someone than to keep them in jail for the rest of their lives,” Hyden said. “And I don’t think that giving the government the power to kill you is a form of limited government.”

Rector said she urges Tennesseans to write to their state representatives and Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam in order to bring awareness to the many flaws associated with capital punishment and stop 10 executions scheduled to take place in 2015.

“We need Tennesseans to come together to help make that happen,” Rector said.