Friends, the fact that some innocent people are executed in the US from time to time should be reason enough to abolish the death penalty. Supposing its only one or two every twenty years, still.....
RICHMOND, Dec. 14 -- Newly tested DNA evidence from rapes committed perhaps more than 20 years ago have exonerated two Virginians who had served several years behind bars, according to a statement by Gov. Mark R. Warner that is scheduled to be released later today.
One of the defendants served 20 years in prison for a rape in Alexandria that the new testing shows he did not commit. The other assault was in Norfolk.
The revelations are the result of modern-day testing Warner ordered more than a year ago of biological samples that had been collected in thousands of violent criminal cases dating back to the 1970s and 1980s. Those samples were collected before leaps in the forensic science.
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The results from Virginia are sure to add fuel to the national debate about the use of DNA technology, the reliability of evidence in criminal cases and the presence of innocent people waiting to die on death rows across the country.
Read the whole thing here.
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13 comments:
Here, here (or, hear hear...whatever)!! Down with death, up with life. No regime has the right to demand one's life, especially if there is a chance they could be worng about the evidence. No death penalty, no war, that's what I say!! Bad evidence is bad evidence.
BFC
WB,
Stop this insane war against the death penalty!!! You are only making yourself look bad.
Merry Christmas,
JA
I'm with you 100%, Father. The Culture of Death must be abolished.
"WHH-PSSSSH" or "Ke-CCCHH! Youre SO good Fr. Im so glad you've raised me so well...
What if they had just whipped Tookie really bad and then let him go?
Would you be for that, WB?
What is ironic here is that we are often told that it's the capital punishment cases in which the greatest care is taken due to the severity (and irreversibility) of the punishment.
And yet... look how many on death row have been let go because subsequent information -- discovered long after this "greatest care" was exercised all the way through to its wrongful conclusion.
If this is what we get when the "greatest care" is taken, what about all the *other* convictions where there wasn't a need to take such great care?
I would be willing to bet that if one could do some independent testing of the criminal justice system, one would find that it is an exceedingly poor discriminator between guilt and innocence.
Seppu, I hope you don't drive the way you want the criminal justice system works -- set the car in the direction you want to go, lash down the wheel, a press on the accelerator and you're off...
...the road.
The overall structure of the criminal justice system is not bad, but it is not sufficient because it runs open-loop, that is, without feedback. (Well, only a little but we'll get to that.)
There are two ways to correct the system on the fly. One is to put "test cases" through and evaluate the results. I'll grant that this one will be tough to set up (it'll require someone with much more knowledge than I of the inner workings of trials), and it will not be cheap. But testing laboratories are routinely subjected to this kind of testing, just to ensure their processes are working properly. (And interesting addition to this would be to submit "identical" cases to multiple venues and compare the results.)
Did you get the wrong result? Did you get different results in different venues? Now you've got material for figuring out why the system isn't working very well.
Another corrective mechanism is to take cases of subsequently-known failure and analyze them for systemic error that led to the result. Why did the absence of DNA evidence lead to the wrong result?
Another element of this is the introduction of new evidence. My understanding is that it is very difficult to introduce new evidence after conviction, and that really only special cases (such as DNA evidence) are allowed to. I can understand the courts' reasoning for this -- redoing trials every time something new is found could be expensive. However, a general prohibition does not serve the cause of justice very well, though it does serve the courts quite well.
One could envision a special court that heard "new evidence" cases and decided whether referral for re-trial was merited. "Courts of Appeal," you say? Think again. They rule primarily on the trial itself, whether procedures were followed, etc., but rarely on new evidence.
My point, SK, is that our country could protect its citizens just as well without killing anyone. Just give life without parole every time you would otherwise have given the death sentence. That way, citizens get protected from criminals, AND you are guaranteed never to kill innocent people... and its cheaper for the tax payer. And the state could then do something compelling with its lifers, like let them dig septic tanks or prune the medians of highways. Everyone wins.
Anonymous,
The problem with the judicial system is that we have jurors. Lawyers attempt to pick the least educated people to ensure their idiotic arguments are more persuadable. People are much more into Nick and Jessica than any true sense of justice. Good luck changing that part of humanity, the communists couldn't.
Why not accept the fact that every human institution is not perfect? But, we still have to keep the streets safe.
Fantley.
SK, for a Wagnerian elitist ("twelve ordinary idiots"), you have a remarkable confidence in the machinations of American democracy ("If people want..."). Presumably there are SOME limits on the normativity of the whims of idiots. I wonder what?
SK,
I guess we're not as far apart as I'd thought. Mea culpa. Where I have a major disagreement with the way things are done today is the teaching in schools that our system is perfect/ideal/whatever. I know *I* encountered that, and I suspect most have (based on available evidence).
I probably do not have in my voluminous files (if I do I'd be hard-pressed to find it) a copy of a letter from a juror in a case, long ago, that said she would *never* have voted for conviction had she known some piece of evidence the judge excluded from the trial. And this preceded some really significant evidence that surfaced years later.
But the concept of "The Immaculate Conviction" simply has to go. I've no doubt that quite the majority of those convicted are guilty, but I'm sure that a good number of innocents end up in the system.
In any case, how do you run test case? It's not an easy situation, but I believe there are ways that it can be done. And don't forget, even if that turns out to be impossible, there still are the, um, "post-mortem" analyis of cases subsequently determined to be worngful convictions that we ought to be using to improve the system.
Or maybe it's an acceptable cost of doing government business that X percentage of our civilians/subjects end up wrongfully in prison. Hey, let's codify and embody the number in law.
If Sk is ready to do her part to support the system, at any time in the future... I have no problem with that.
attacking McDonalds because I used to spit in the milkshake machine when I worked there.
SK, guess I forgot the quotemarks. I never worked at McDonald's... ;-)
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