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Originally Posted by smooth
Yes, I agree that innocent until proven guilty is a belief in our judicial system--it's also a farce.
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Once again, I'm astounded at that statement.
There have been many many cases of police departments, individual detectives or officers and even officers of the court fabricating evidence, hiding facts, avoiding due disclosure... effectively "framing" people.
This is certainly not the norm, but it has happened.
Yet here you are stating that a fundamental tenet upon which the entire US justice system is based, and indeed one shared by all democratic western civilizations, is a farce.
You specifically state that once someone is in court that they are, effectively at least in your eyes, guilty.
Wrong wrong wrong.
Statisical probability does not, and should not, take the place of moral objectivism and the need to prove an accused's guilt.
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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.
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This is wrong. For starters, I can refer to you to the work of Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld. They alone have proved the innocence of 37 people, due to the use of DNA evidence. Twenty of these case histories are detailed in the book
Actual Innocence: Five Days to Execution, and Other Dispatches From the Wrongly Convicted, written by Peter, Barry, and Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Jim Dwyer.
You can read move about their activities at
http://www.innocenceproject.org/
Now, no one should be silly enough to think that Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld have discovered each and every wrongly convicted person in the United States. Therefore, by implication, there must be
more.
Even at 37, we have already proved statement of "less than 20" to be wrong by a factor of 85%,
based upon the work on only two advocates alone.
Let me go on.
Quoting directly from the ACLU,
"As of February 2004, 113 inmates had been found innocent and released from death row. More than half of these have been released in the last 10 years."
Futhermore,
"A study by Columbia University professor James Liebman examined thousands of capital sentences that had been reviewed by courts in 34 states from 1973 to 1995. “An astonishing 82 percent of death row inmates did not deserve to receive the death penalty,” he said in his conclusion. “One in twenty death row inmates is later found not guilty.”
I also respectfully refer you to an analysis of the average number of executions per exoneration, at this URL:
http://www.aclu.org/Files/OpenFile.cfm?id=14879
So we now see that your statement that Wilton Dedge's release was an aberration, or "just one person" is wholly, absolutely, and verifiably incorrect.
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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.
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I don't know what you mean by "up there", but I don't disagree with you that the American justice system is overloaded.
Does that justify willfully ignoring the capacity to prove people's innocence? In my opinion, the answer is a resounding "No."
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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.
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I respectfully refer you to the references above. As has been proven,
at least 113 prisoners have been released from
Death Row (since 1973) alone.
This does not take into consideration the number of prisoners who are serving jail time.
We could argue about making a statistical estimate, based upon the number of exonerations vis a vis the number of prisoners, to come at a number of presumably innocent prisoners, but I fear that would degenerate into "lies, damned lies and statistics".
Rest assured, however, that if 113 Death Row prisoners have been proven innocent, then a
far greater number of the estimated 2,000,000 (your figure) prisoners are also innocent.
What's my point? Simply that those incarcerated and sentenced to death should not be
forbidden the right to use DNA evidence. That's all.
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The possibility that it could just be this one is a fact, although more being present is also a possible fact.
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It is not a possible fact.
It
IS a fact.
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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.
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You are of course correct. Neither you or I know the full extent. Yet there are those who are acting as advocates and civil libertarians who
have studied the issue. What you and I should be careful about is not simply discounting that.
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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).
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I don't really understand the point of that statement. I'm not suggesting that a large proportion of those incarcerated are innocent; simply a small proportion. And that they should be allowed to use DNA evidence to help prove their innocence.
If you wish to refuse to consider that, then by all means continue to do so. And I shall continue in my opinion that it is wrong.
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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.
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An excellent proposal, and I suppose, one closest to what I would recommend myself (in an ideal world).
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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.
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Well, there are no quick and dirty answers.
I would agree with your proposal above. But we're not going to change the world now, are we?
Mr Mephisto