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I think if the appeals process was limited and a time frame in place from sentencing to execution, it may have more effect.

They did that in the US with the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) in 1996. The idea was to streamline all capital appeals into one state court post-conviction appeal, and then one federal habeas corpus appeal in which the prisoner can only raise arguments that were raised in the state court appeal. Of course, there's the little problem that sometimes the prisoner doesn't have a good lawyer or any lawyer at all for this process and doesn't know all the arguments that he or she could make, so valid bases for appeal become useless if they weren't properly raised in the state court appeal, but people don't seem to care much about that.

And then there's also the problem that sometimes the factual underpinnings for the appeal don't come to light until after the prisoner's already been through a round of appeals and lost...like in the case of Troy Davis here in Georgia who had 7 of the 9 eyewitnesses against him recant their testimony and claim they were pressured by police to finger the wrong guy, when really it was one of the other 2 eyewitnesses who did the shooting. (Not surprisingly, the "real shooter" and one other witness have disappeared.) His state court appeal seeking a new trial due to newly discovered evidence of actual innocence was just rejected by the GA Supreme Court. When he files a federal appeal, it will almost certainly be rejected as untimely. And then his execution will be set for sometime later this year even though the stories of the recanting eyewitnesses make it pretty clear that an actually innocent man has spent the last 20 years in prison.

Where is the justice in that? And how does limiting appeals help people like Troy Davis? The biggest problem with the system is the backlog in the appellate courts. States like California take on average 5-10 years for the one consolidated post-conviction appeal to work its way through the system. ONE appeal. Not dozens of specious appeals filed one after the other. The states don't want to dedicate the resources to expanding the appellate courts or forcing them to deal with their backlog more efficiently, but that's their choice. After AEDPA, though, the idea of the filing of countless appeals to prolong the inevitable is really not accurate because any appeals beyond the one state and the one federal are usually going to be dismissed as untimely. If you set a timeframe in which the appeals need to be handled, then you're going to have to spend bajillions beefing up the appellate courts to be able to hear those appeals within the timeframe you specify.