Posted on 12/28/2005 7:44:08 PM PST by A. Pole
While enjoying the Christmas season in the comfort of your home, take a minute to say a prayer for the wrongfully convicted.
American prisons are full of wrongfully convicted persons. Many were coerced into admitting to crimes they did not commit by prosecutors threats to pile on more charges. Others were convicted by false testimony from criminals bribed by prosecutors, who exchanged dropped charges or reduced sentences for false testimony against defendants.
Not all the wrongfully convicted are poor. Some are wealthy and prominent people targeted by corrupt prosecutors seeking a celebrity case in order to boost their careers.
Until it happens to them or to a member of their family, Americans are clueless as to the corruption in the criminal justice (sic) system. Most prosecutors are focused on their conviction rates, and judges are focused on clearing their court dockets. Defendants are processed accordingly, not in terms of guilt or innocence.
Law and order conservatives wrongly believe that the justice (sic) system is run by liberal judges who turn the criminals loose. In actual fact, the system is so loaded against a defendant that very few people, including the totally innocent, dare to risk a trial. Almost all (95 percent to 97 percent) felony indictments are settled by a coerced plea. By withholding exculpatory evidence, suborning perjury, fabricating evidence and lying to jurors, prosecutors have made the risks of a trial too great even for the innocent. Consequently, the prosecutors cases and police evidence are almost never tested in court. Defendants are simply intimidated into self-incrimination rather than risk the terrors of trial.
According to Yale University law professor John Langbein, The parallels between the modern American plea bargaining system and the ancient system of judicial torture are many and chilling. Just as the person on the rack admitted to guilt in order to stop the pain, the present day defendant succumbs to psychological torture and cops a plea, whether he is innocent or guilty, in order to avoid ever more charges.
Michael Tonry, director of Cambridge Universitys Institute of Criminology, reports that the United States has a higher percentage of its population in prison than any country on earth, including dictatorships, tyrannies and China. The U.S. incarceration rate is up to 12 times higher than that of European countries.
Unless you believe Americans are 12 times more criminally inclined than Europeans, why is one of every 80 Americans (not counting children and the elderly) locked away from family, friends, career and life? Part of the answer is the private prison industry, which requires inmates to fuel the profits of investors. Another part of the answer is career-driven prosecutors who want convictions at all costs. Yet another is the failure of judges to rein in prosecutorial abuses. Another part of the answer is the hostility of Americans to defendants and indifference to their innocence or guilt.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq has brought the breakdown in American moral fiber to the fore. The horrific tortures and abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the public justifications of torture by the president and vice president of the United States, and the CIA kidnappings and torture of detainees in secret prisons put the American liberators in the same camp as Saddam Hussein. It is ironic that mistreatment of Iraqis is one of the justifications that Bush uses for overthrowing Saddam.
In his book, Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws, Judge Andrew P. Napolitano reports on cases of torture, psychological abuse and frame-ups that he discovered as presiding judge.
I have reported a number of wrongful convictions. Anytime a new offense is created, the word goes out to produce convictions. Over a decade ago, William R. Strong Jr. was made a victim of Virginias new wife rape law. Strong discovered his wife in an affair with her boyfriend and was about to serve her with divorce papers. She found out and struck first, accusing him of rape. Strong has been trying to get a DNA test for many years, confident that the semen in the perk test is that of the lover of his unfaithful wife, but Virginias criminal justice (sic) system is unresponsive.
Another innocent victim of Virginia justice (sic) is Chris Gaynor. Gaynor took his skateboard team to a competition. When one of the kids tried to buy drugs, Gaynor threatened to tell his parents. To pre-empt Gaynor, the kid accused him of sexual abuse. There was no evidence against Gaynor, and the entire team knew the real story. However, Gaynor was framed by a corrupt prosecutor, reportedly a man-hating lesbian, with the connivance of a corrupt judge, who intimidated Gaynors young witnesses by jailing one of them without cause. Gaynors innocence was of less importance to the criminal justice (sic) system than a desire to increase convictions for child sex abuse.
In America, defendants are no longer innocent until they are proven guilty. They are guilty the minute they are charged, and the system works to process the guilty, not to determine innocence or guilt.
Americans in their ignorance and gullibility think that only the guilty would enter a guilty plea. This is the uninformed opinion of the naive who have never experienced the terror and psychological torture of the U.S. criminal justice (sic) system.
I remember when this author wrote with sense and clarity. IIRC, he worked in the Reagan Administration. But Paul Craig Roberts has become kind of a libertarian version of Ramsey Clarke. Seriously goofy. The next Sherman Skolnick. He used to be a regular columnist in a lot of regular newspapers, but I don't see him around too much anymore except in things like this 'Chronicles Magazine'.
bttt
Who are some of these wealthy and prominent people wrongfully sent to prison?
I hope that you won't cite Mumia Abu-Jamal or Martha Stewart.
There are about 32,000 inmates in NC, out of a population of about 5.5 million. That's one inmate per 172 population. This tells me that "excluding children and people +65" excludes a bit more than half the population.
If there's supposed to be a presumption of innocence, why does the state spend far more money on the proposition that you're guilty than on the proposition that you're not guilty?
ROFLMAFO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I hate to sound like an old fart, but Jury Duty is a very important responsibility. A jury trial is one of the mainstays of our system. You should really try find it in your heart to participate willingly if called again. Around here you can only be called every three years.
Happy new year!
Everyone in prison is innocent and American military are all terrorists. /sarcasm off
Proves my point, this guy is a leftist wacko. How can anyone use him as a source? geeesh
Useless Idiots
I guess what riled me up was the declaration that all prisoners are innocent and all Military personnel are sadists. I know there are occasional problems with tainted witnesses etc BUT THOSE ARE THE EXCEPTION NOT THE RULE AS that idiot wrote and the military took appropriate action (overreacted IMHO) to halt "torture".
Like my mama used to say, Wheres there smoke theres fire. If they werent guilty of something they would never have been arrested. She was very naive.
Someone I know was in jail for drug posession, and she was sentanced to 4 months. Due to circumstances, she actually spent 3 days shy of 5 months in jail. First, someone misplaced her paperwork, then the judge who was on her case was taken ill, and then the DOC decided to ship her off to a different jail. Her lawyer actually thought that she had been released, since the jail told him that she wasn't there. They didn't mention that she had been transfered! Once at the new jail, when they got the release papers, nobody at the DOC could figure out whos responsibility it was to get her back to Kansas City (Overland Park, KS actually).
I told her that the next time she was sent to jail, she should claim those 27 days of extra time spent as credit towards any new sentance!
Unfortunately, the girl's got a bad drug problem, and has been back in jail for some time now. I hope that this time, she's getting some of the help she needs while in jail. If she doesn't, she's going to kill herself with her addiction.
Mark
Perfectly innocent people "cop a plea". Yep.
We (The People) give the courts and police the power to hold our lives within their hands. With that power, comes great responsibility. Corruption in this area needs to be dealt with in a brutal and final fasion.
While there are always going to be mistakes in the criminal justice system, outright corruption must NEVER be condoned!
There's a very simple way to ensure this sort of thing never happens. When a prosecutor, judge, or police officer is proven to have provided false evidence, covered up evidence, or manufactured evidence, they need to be convicted and sentanced to whatever sentance the wrongly convicted got.
A good example of this is something that came out a few years ago. The FBI in (I think) Boston had a confidential informant who they knew was continuing to engage in criminal acts. When two other men were accused of the crimes that the CI had committed, not only did the FBI agents cover up the fact that it was the CI who committed the crime, but they actually helped the police's case against the innocent men. One of the men actually died in prison (of natural causes), and the other spent a very long time in jail before he was proven innocent. Those FBI agents, and everyone else involved in the coverup need to be sent to the same prison, for the rest of their lives.
Mark
Not to sound too preachy, your lawyer friend is absolutely right. The jury system is based on the concept of decent people being willing to make a decision based on the laws, testimony, and evidence presented to them. Without good people willing to serve, the jury system becomes... Well, pretty much what we're seeing today.
I've been called to sit on a jury 3 times now. The first while I was in college, living out of state, so I was unable to do so. Twice now, I've had to take off of work, and pay my own parking (the per diem from the courts didn't cover the cost of parking downtown!) to sit for 4 hours, three days in a row, before being dismissed as not being needed.
I've gone, and felt good about it, because I know that it's part of my responsibility as an American citizen.
Mark
ping
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