According to Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project, the 200th person to be exonerated by DNA evidence is about to leave prison. These 200 come from every background and many professions though, predictable, a disproportionate number are black men who could not afford legal council at the time of their conviction. These people spent years, often decades, in prison for violent crimes they didn't commit.
We all like to think of crime solving as cut and dried stuff - like CSI - they target the right person, get the damning evidence and then, just for fun, convince them to confess in a really low-key interrogation. But as with most things, the truth lies in the gray areas where I'd like to believe it's earnest law enforcers and lawyers making the kinds of mistakes we all make from time to time. But in their cases, it can lead to unjust imprisonment and years shaved off a person's life because of faulty eyewitness testimony, coerced confessions or overworked and underfunded crime labs. CSI may be able to push through evidence but, last I heard, in Greensboro we have to send our evidence off to a backed-up SBI lab.
Of course, the upside is at least these 200 had the opportunity to revisit their case and keep pushing for justice year after year. Those imprisoned without habeas corpus at Guantanamo and wherever else the U.S. has so-called enemy combatants stashed don't even have that light at the end of the tunnel.
Read more about why the innocent so often slip through the cracks on the Innocence Project Web site or the book that opened my eyes to these issues while I was getting my psychology degree, Witness for the Defense by Elizabeth Loftus.
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2 comments:
Sara Beth,
Well, thank goodness, as you said, that these people have been released. I am probably pretty conservative on the law enforcement issues, and do not have a moral objection to capital punishment per se, but the extreme disparity in ability to have good legal counsel that exists in our society is, frankly, a huge black eye on the "justness" of our system. I do not have an answer - tons more public money for free legal help? As you say, it is not like it seems on CSI. The ugly flip side is that the ability of very guilty rich people to afford the kind of law firms that can overwhelm the county attorneys is another injustice. On the prosecuting side it is hard to compete with big money as well. These disparities have made me much less a supporter for the death penalty than I used to be. The death penalty itself is not a moral problem for me(and I wish it could be extended to child molestation) but the inability for so many to have appropriate legal counsel has become a moral issue for me. It is simply not just, and we now are seeing the results.
Joel, I take it you're of the eye-for-an-eye camp rather than the turn-the-other-cheek camp. In terms of a plain ole cost benefit analysis (money spent for capital punishment [more] versus life in prison [less] and how it affect the crime rate [not enough]), I tend to be against the ultimate punishment except in cases when the criminal could continue to perpetrate crime from prison (see Saddam). From a gut-level place, I couldn't press the syringe so I can't advocate for the death penalty.
But that's besides the point: I totally agree that we have to figure out a way to prevent poor people in the justice system from being punished for not having the money to hire the best defense... which is a long way of saying they're getting punished for being poor. I hear the local League of Woman voters is doing interesting work on that end...
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