File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_2003/lyotard.0305, message 57


Date: Fri, 23 May 2003 08:46:59 -0700
From: Judy <jaw-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: Re: U.S. adult correctional population, end of 2001. UK NUmbers


hugh, all, i was just reading this yesterday, more info:


May 22, 2003
COMMENTARY
Innocence Doesn't Pay Either

By Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George 
Washington Law School.

Across the country, an estimated 10,000 prisoners are serving time 
for crimes they did not commit. The few who are able to prove their 
innocence (primarily through DNA testing) often find themselves 
outside a prison with a handful of cash and a clean shirt as their 
only compensation. They are the dark secret of the U.S. justice 
system - the legal version of "friendly fire" casualties that 
prosecutors only reluctantly acknowledge.

Steven Toney was one such recent case. When Toney was arrested in 
Missouri in 1983 for a bad check, he was confident he could prove his 
innocence and have the charge dropped. Indeed, it was dropped. 
However, while Toney was being held, he was asked to stand in a 
lineup in a rape case. The victim picked him out despite the lack of 
any evidence connecting him to the crime. Toney was offered a deal 
but he refused. He insisted he was innocent and decided to fight the 
charge. He was convicted.

Although prosecutors fought his efforts to have a privately funded 
DNA test, Toney was finally exonerated after almost 14 years in 
prison. He is now 55, with much of his life taken away from him and 
no resources to build a future on what is left. Missouri offers no 
compensation to wrongly convicted people.

Most states are like Missouri and offer wrongly convicted people 
their freedom and little else. In Florida, for example, the only 
assistance is $100 and a bus ticket.

Only 16 states have any system to compensate such individuals, and 
the level of compensation varies wildly. In Texas, a wrongly 
convicted person can receive up to $500,000. California recently 
capped compensation at roughly $100 per day of incarceration - an 
improvement from a previous $10,000 cap. Some other states like New 
York and West Virginia have no limits and allow compensation to be 
set by the merits of the case.

Other than death, there may be no greater injury that a state can 
commit than to rob the innocent of their freedom. A recent study 
showed that the average time spent in jail by the wrongly convicted 
was 12 years. Most exhausted their financial resources and lost 
critical years with their children.

Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and other members of Congress have 
reintroduced a bill that would raise compensation for wrongly 
convicted federal prisoners from $5,000 to $50,000 a year, $100,000 
for capital cases. They have also called on states to match this 
level of compensation as a minimum.

In one recent Ohio case, a falsely convicted man received $737,000 
for 10 years of incarceration. In states like Wisconsin, however, 
citizens are limited to $5,000 a year.

Such caps, or even outright prohibition of recovery, create a bizarre 
situation for citizens. If California neglects a road or a bridge and 
causes an injury, a citizen may sue and receive ample compensation. 
But when the state convicts an individual on dubious grounds and 
ruins his life, he is limited to $100 a day in compensation.

Capping or barring such recovery has an obvious effect on 
prosecutorial decision-making. Prosecutors are motivated to maximize 
their conviction numbers. In the next election, every district 
attorney wants to be able to cite a significant increase in 
convictions, and every prosecutor is expected to contribute to the 
head count. When it turns out that they convicted various innocent 
people, prosecutors generally disavow responsibility and blame the 
jury for the decision.

The fact is that it is the prosecutors, not the juries, who are most 
responsible for these tragedies. Despite the presumption of 
innocence, the reality of a trial is that a defendant is presumed 
guilty by many jurors. Some prosecution offices have a conviction 
rate higher than 90%.

For this reason, prosecutors are supposed to exercise discretion. 
They are supposed to send cases back to investigators when evidence 
is weak or questionable. But they rarely do so in a process that 
looks more like a factory system than a justice system.

If states were required to pay for the negligence of prosecutors, 
there would be greater emphasis on evidence than on statistics. 
Prosecutors with a high number of false convictions would impose a 
heavy (and unpopular) cost on citizens. The most negligent would 
effectively price themselves out of office.

In most states, the ranks of the falsely convicted remain forgotten, 
ignored as unwelcome reminders of the fragility of our justice 
system. Until the public deals with those unnecessarily harmed by 
that system, justice will remain a concept best observed from a great 
distance.



Copyright 2003 Los Angeles Times



   

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