Scores in N.C. are legally 'innocent,' yet still imprisoned

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2012-06-13/innocent-incarcerated-prisoners/55585176/1

by dsr_ • 14 years ago

38 11 14 years ago

mlinksva• 14 years ago

'"We can't be outcome driven," said Anne Tompkins, the U.S. attorney in Charlotte.'

The quote seems like it may be out of context even in the article, but seems like a good capture of the problems with total dedication to process over discretion and justice described (or so I gather, have only read reviews of yet) in "The Collapse of American Criminal Justice" by William Stuntz.

_delirium• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, once a conviction is final, it's fairly hard for courts to use any sort of discretion; there are strict limits, made stricter by legislation in recent years, on what kinds of challenges they can consider. Though as the article notes, the exact scope of the limits as applied here is unclear, so they might conceivably be expanded.

On the other hand, executive pardons and commutations have always been intended as a partial safety valve against too process-focused jurisprudence: the idea is that a thoughtful executive has the power to say, "this is not the just outcome" in specific cases, approving exceptions outside of the usual proceedings of the law. Unfortunately for that theory, though, in the past few decades pardons and commutations have become a big political risk. If you pardon someone, you get no major benefit (a handful of bleeding-heart liberals will like you, but not many), unless the person is really well-connected. But, you incur a bit potential risk if the person you pardoned ends up committing a future crime; the "Willie Horton problem". So the safe course of action is to let ten innocent people rot in jail, rather than risk pardoning a dangerous person (the exact opposite of the traditional maxim).

freerobby• 14 years ago

To add some perspective here, Justice Scalia went so far as to claim the government has the right to kill a known-to-be-innocent person so long as they were at some point found guilty by a habeas court.

Here's the quote:

“This court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is ‘actually’ innocent. Quite to the contrary, we have repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt that any claim based on alleged ‘actual innocence’ is constitutionally cognizable.”

I personally loved Alan Dershowitz's retort, though it's a lot less relevant than the words of someone who sits on the Bench:

"Let us be clear precisely what this means. If a defendant were convicted, after a constitutionally unflawed trial, of murdering his wife, and then came to the Supreme Court with his very much alive wife at his side, and sought a new trial based on newly discovered evidence (namely that his wife was alive), these two justices would tell him, in effect: “Look, your wife may be alive as a matter of fact, but as a matter of constitutional law, she’s dead, and as for you, Mr. Innocent Defendant, you’re dead, too, since there is no constitutional right not to be executed merely because you’re innocent.”"

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/08/18/scalias-cat...

vacri2• 14 years ago

In my home state in Australia, we've just elected a conservative on a 'law and order' ticket (it's not why he won, the other main party was old, tired, and overconfident). Anyway, he's doing a number of questionable head-in-the-cloud things, and looks favourably on the unforgiving US style of justice. One of the things he's talking about is making sentences longer 'because that's what the community wants, harsher sentences'. Yes, when people read a one-liner in a paper, they cry for blood.

The thing is, the Law Institute of Victoria did a study with the general public, and found that when give the details of the case in question, they suggested shorter sentences than the courts were actually assigning. Therein lies the problem with listening to the tabloids - there's no detail.

Of course, the other side of the coin is that politicians never listen to the public when it comes to something as simple as their own payrises, so why should you consider the general public to be the final authority on something as complex and nuanced as law and order?

tomjen3• 14 years ago

Best example I know of to illustrate what happens when you don't have a guy with the authority to say 'this is insane, stop doing this'.

raymondh• 14 years ago

Governors have that power.

andrewpi• 14 years ago

Actually Governors don't have that power in this situation, since it involves Federal law.

amishforkfight• 14 years ago

I'd like to see the prosecutors of these cases jailed for the equivalent time lost by by those wrongfully imprisoned. "Sovereign immunity?" Sorry, I guess you should do your job then. If you find out later that you did your job so wrong that someone loses 10 years of their life, you sure as shit better be the first one in line unlocking their cell.

Public officials have great power, and there needs to be an equally great responsibility and consequence for abusing that power. And yes, being ignorant or making the wrong decision counts as abuse of power.

mahyarm• 14 years ago

They can never make mistakes, so either nobody does the job or they become even worse monsters since the system cannot admit to mistakes, ever.

vacri2• 14 years ago

Can we get away from the 'one mistake and you're fucked for life' mindset? Sure, fuck someone with a track record of mistakes, but these cases are fixable - release the guys, compensate them for being wrongly convicted, record a mistake on the prosecutors record, move on.

Scores in N.C. are legally 'innocent,' yet still imprisoned

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