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Originally Posted by Mr Mephisto
If that's true, thank you for enlightening me.
You cannot be serious! Innocent until proven guilty is one of the lauded standards for which the US stands, isn't it?
I'm astounded at that statement.
I didn't pluck one person. There have been plenty of examples of this happening. The issue at here is not this one person, but the fact that many states do not allow someone to refer to DNA analysis after their conviction. I could also point out that, in many cases, DNA evidence was simply not available at the time of their conviction, but I should assume this is obvious.
Mr Mephisto
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Yes, I agree that innocent until proven guilty is a belief in our judicial system--it's also a farce.
I cringe when I hear the DA speak like that to any students in any classes I TA (btw, I'm a crim, law & society ph.d. student), but the reality is that by the time someone stands before a jury the lock is pretty much in. If you happen to have an innocent person in the docket, there really isn't much to be done at that point.
I would hold that the stronger argument is that people walk around with different notions of culpability and/or what the crime really is rather than whether or not a particular person did a particular behavior.
My project is to ensure that the context of a given behavior is presented to the jury so they can make a better informed decision as to whether it should be punishable by the pre-determined amount of prison time--not whether the person actually did or did not, for example, shoot someone. Almost all times the person before the court did do a deviant behavior. The other times might be a case like the one you just referred to: but there haven't been plenty of cases in the sense you made it out to be. Plenty for people like you and me, but less than 20 nonetheless. Our criminal justice is not like yours up there. We churn through millions of people per year. I was giving you a figure for how many people are behind bars at this one moment in time. That's just a snapshot of the millions of people churining through the system and doesn't reflect the people on various types of supervison--both pre- and post-prison. Our system is massive and I don't think people even fathom how we churn through our population.
You did just pluck a single instance out of approximately 2 million people currently incarcerated. You have no possible way to know how many more are currently behind bars who should not be. The possibility that it could just be this one is a fact, although more being present is also a possible fact. Neither you nor I nor anyone else studying this phenomenon knows the extent and we need to be very careful how rearrange or dismantle various machinations of the criminal justice system. I already told you I believed that just 1 was 1 too many even at the expense of releasing others believed to be guilty--I don't know what more you'd want me to say on that subject other than to say that your posted story resonates very deeply with me--especially the part about not even getting a bus ticket after someone kicking your ass out of the pen after the court finally overturns the conviction; but that's so far into another thread that I may never bring it up again on this board.
But I'm not going to sit here and think in my mind that 2,000 people (that's .001 percent of 2,000,000--the most improbable cut-off point for statistical analysis) are currently incarcerated for lack of DNA evidence that could exonerate them. That 2 mil figure is general population. DNA evidence doesn't do much for the drug user (why our prisons are bursting, btw), so my numbers are artificially inflated but heuristically useful in the sense that we really are talking about an infantismile population (guilty for want of DNA that could prove otherwise).
What I will do is offer an alternative--open appeals to allow evidence that wasn't available during the time of conviction or that was not introduced due to ineffective public counsel.
Of course, we are trammeling on some very deep-felt social issues. Not the least is that we are now suggesting increased expenditure on convicted criminals in a social climate where regular citizens are going through hard times and our long-term economy is shifting in perilous ways.
You tell me how to remedy this kind of issue in our current social climate and I'll listen.