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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2002
America's courts are the machinery of injustice!
Chicago--Recently the Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEDP)
held its national conference here; Northwestern University Law School hosted a
celebration of Death Row exonerations and a Center on Wrongful Convictions (CWC)
benefit dinner featuring wrongfully arrested Brenton Butler; and
"Resistance to Repression" took place at Kent College of Law. These
expositions of the clay feet of American justice were aided by the 85
recommendations of Illinois Gov. George Ryan’s Commission on Capital
Punishment. Stephen Bright, director of the Southern Center for Human Rights and
keynote speaker at the CEDP conference and Ryan, speaking at NU, referred to the
recommendations, which apply to all criminal cases. The first, the "tunnel vision" recommendation,
reads, "After a suspect has been identified, the police should continue to
pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry, whether these point towards or away from
the suspect." Once prosecutors get a theory of a case, they fail to follow
other leads. Rolando Cruz, the Ford Heights Four, Anthony Porter, suspects in
the Central Park Jogger case, Butler and the West Memphis 3 satisfied theories
that blinded law enforcement to other possibilities. Prosecutors work hard to support their theories,
withholding as much (or more) from the defense as the law allows. Our culture
requires this adversarial mindset. But it had a heart-rending result in Chicago
during Death Row clemency hearings when victims’ families re-exposed grief and
sadness. However, justice administered during the anguish of loss might as well
be frontier justice--swift and unsure. Instead, criminal justice should be
dispassionate in order to arrive at the truth. Rob Warden of CWC says, "This has been the year of the
false confession." Confessions coerced by psychological and/or physical
torture, or even fabricated by law enforcement were a factor in some
convictions. The Commission devoted 12% of its recommendations to interrogation,
taping, funding and training to improve suspect interrogation and how it is
legally interpreted. Butler’s case stands out. He is a 15-year-old whom police
brutalized when a grieving husband identified him. The Academy-Award winning
documentary, "Murder on a Sunday Morning," tells the story. And impeachable witnesses, such as jailhouse snitches or
people whose charges and sentences were mitigated in return for lying in court,
can convince juries. Some eyewitnesses are sincere, but human fallibility
impeaches them. Gary Wells of Iowa State University, an expert in this field
insists on two basic techniques: 1) Double-blind testing, that is, the person asking the
questions does not know which is the suspect. 2) The witness must be presented with suspects one by one.
To each individual he must say "yes" or "no" before
going to the next, because in a "lineup" the witness feels compelled
to choose and will finger the individual who looks most like the person he saw
commit the crime. Law enforcement often rejects scientific methods because
the prosecutor simply has to convince the jury that the witness is telling the
truth to get a conviction. We wouldn't tolerate the error rate in other aspects of
life that we tolerate in Criminal Justice, Bright said. But the public is
partially responsible for the extraordinary mistakes made by law enforcement.
The culture of the prosecutor’s office demands convictions, not truth. The
"public" expects this and elects this. Musician, songwriter, playwright and novelist, Steve Earle
spelled it out in a recent interview at Salon.com. Said Earle, "[It’s]
the politics of fear. People go to law school in order to become
prosecutors...to become district attorneys...to become attorney general....to
become governor. First you scare the f… out of everybody...then offer them a
solution....No one’s ever been able to prove ...any correlation between the
Death Penalty and any deterrence of violent crime." According to Bright, Justice is the branch of government
least affected by the Civil Rights Movement. In some southern states when the
court opens it "looks like a slave ship just came in," with so many
Black defendants. In Greene County, Ga. Bright saw a court that heard 114 cases
in one day. The public ("poor") lawyer defended 95 men whose cases he
didn’t know. Illinois prosecutors extracted tears from crime victims’
families to put pressure on Ryan not to commute death sentences to
"life;" as though killing the innocent--or the guilty--helps those who
lost loved ones. Once the guilty are caught, said Bright, the public safety is
served–no need to kill. Capturing the Washington area snipers removed their
threat, he said. The Governor’s Commission dealt with most of the factors
that compromise justice. But people require a new kind of relationship to
government. Otherwise, our culture will deny prosecutorial mistakes; innocent
people will be incarcerated and killed on tax-bought gurneys "in our
name." --January |
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