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Now
The Christmas season is a time to remember
the unfortunate. Among the most unfortunate people are those
who have been wrongly convicted and imprisoned.
The United States has a large
number of wrongfully convicted. There are many reasons for this.
One is that the US has the largest percentage of its citizens
imprisoned of all countries in the world, including China. One
of every 32 US adults is behind bars, on probation or on parole.
Given a wrongful conviction rate, the larger the percentage of
citizens in jails, the greater the number of wrongfully convicted.
According to the International
Center for Prison Studies at King's College in London, the US
has 700,000 more of its citizens incarcerated than China, a country
with a population four to five times larger than that of the
US, and 1,330,000 more people in prison than crime-ridden Russia.
The US has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's
prisoners. The American incarceration rate is seven times higher
than that of European countries. Either America is the land
of criminals, or something is seriously wrong with the criminal
justice (sic) system in "the land of the free."
In the US the wrongful conviction
rate is extremely high. One reason is that hardly any of the
convicted have had a jury trial. No peers have heard the evidence
against them and found them guilty. In the US criminal justice
(sic) system, more than 95% of all felony cases are settled with
a plea bargain.
Before jumping to the conclusion
that an innocent person would not admit guilt, be aware of how
the process works. Any defendant who stands trial faces more
severe penalties if found guilty than if he agrees to a plea
bargain. Prosecutors don't like trials because they are time
consuming and a lot of work. To discourage trials, prosecutors
offer defendants reduced charges and lighter sentences than would
result from a jury conviction. In the event a defendant insists
upon his innocence, prosecutors pile on charges until the defendant's
lawyer and family convince the defendant that a jury is likely
to give the prosecutor a conviction on at least one of the many
charges and that the penalty will be greater than a negotiated
plea.
The criminal justice (sic)
system today consists of a process whereby a defendant is coerced
into admitting to a crime in order to escape more severe punishment
for maintaining his innocence. Many of the crimes for which
people are imprisoned never occurred. They are made up crimes
created by the process of negotiation to close a case.
This takes most of the work
out of the system and, thereby, suits police, prosecutors, and
judges to a tee. Police do not have to be careful about evidence,
because they know that no more than one case out of twenty will
ever be tested in the courtroom.
Prosecutors do not have to
make decisions about which cases to prosecute or risk losing
cases. By coercing pleas, prosecutors can prosecute every case
and boast of extremely high conviction rates.
When prosecutors had to decide
which cases to prosecute, they had to examine the evidence and
to investigate the defendant's side of the story. No more. The
evidence seldom comes into play. In place of a determination
of innocence or guilt, prosecutors negotiate with lawyers the
crimes to which a defendant will enter a plea.
Prosecutors have lost sight
of innocence and guilt. What we have today is a conveyor belt
that convicts almost everyone who is charged. Every defense attorney
knows that today prosecutors can purchase testimony against a
defendant by paying a "witness" with money, dropped
charges, or reduced time to testify against the defendant. Many
prosecutors become highly annoyed at any disruption of the plea
bargain conviction process. A defendant that incurs the prosecutor's
ire is certain to be framed on far more serious charges than
a negotiated plea.
Going to trial is no guarantee
that an innocent person will be acquitted. Prosecutors routinely
withhold exculpatory evidence and suborn perjury. Generally,
jurors trust prosecutors and are unaware of their inventory of
dirty tricks. Few jurors can tell the difference between bogus
evidence and real evidence. For example, psychologists and criminologists
have established beyond all doubt that eye-witnesses are wrong
50% of the time. Yet, jurors usually believe eye-witnesses unless
they think the witness has it in for the defendant and is lying.
Prosecutors--and there are
still a few--who are meticulous about their cases and fair to
defendants show poor results compared to the high convictions
attained by prosecutors who run plea bargain mills and frame-up
factories. Today's criminal justice (sic) system is results orientated,
not justice orientated.
In the past judges could give
light sentences to people they believed had been wrongfully convicted.
But "law and order conservatives" have taken sentencing
discretion away from judges. Today prosecutors hold all the
cards.
Many conservatives believe
that prisons are full of hardened criminals who liberal judges
are determined to release to prey upon society. In truth, the
largest percentage of prisoners are drug users who are victims
of the conservatives' "war on drugs." Drug offenses
account for 49 percent of federal prison population growth between
1995 and 2003. Many of these prisoners are mothers arrested
for drug use. The greatest victims of the drug laws are the children
whose mothers are incarcerated.
As females become sexually
active at younger and younger ages, state legislatures have stupidly
raised the age at which it is legal to engage in sexual activity.
Today, a significant percentage of new prisoners are young men
imprisoned for engaging in sexual activity with teenage girls.
In the US, criminal justice (sic) has more to do with ruining
people than with punishing criminals.
I have written often about
wrongful convictions. We know that wrongful conviction is a serious
problem when the advent of DNA evidence has led to the release
of a significant number of innocent people who were convicted
of murderer and rape, and when a number of law schools feel that
it is necessary for them to operate innocence projects that work
for the release of the wrongfully convicted.
Prosecutors are like President
Bush. They absolutely refuse to admit that they ever make a
mistake and have to be forced to disgorge their innocent victims.
Nothing makes a prosecutor more angry than to have to give back
a wrongfully convicted person's life.
Lt. William Strong and Christophe
Gaynor are two of the hundreds of thousands of wrongfully convicted
Americans whose lives have been ruined by an irresponsible and
corrupt criminal justice (sic) system.
In Virginia, Lt. William Strong,
the son of a military family, grew tired of his wife's unfaithfulness
and filed for divorce. The unfaithful wife retaliated by accusing
Strong of marital rape. Neither police nor prosecutor investigated
the charge. Instead, they proceeded to set Strong up for plea
conviction. The arresting officer recommended Strong's attorney,
an incompetent who owed his cases to the police.
Strong insisted on a trial,
but the arresting officer and attorney convinced Strong's parents
that with a plea their son would be out in a year. No one told
Strong or his parents the implications of a plea, and Virginia
Judge Westbrook Parker, playing to feminist voters, gave Strong
a life sentence of 60 years.
The case has many unsavory
appearances. If reports are true, the arresting officer paid
numerous visits to Strong's unfaithful wife, as did Strong's
attorney, and the arresting officer ended up separating from
his wife and leaving the police force.
The perk kit exists and Strong
could be given a DNA test, but Virginia refuses on the grounds
that Strong admitted his guilt. Strong says the semen, if any,
is that of the wife's boyfriend.
Strong has been in prison for
15 years on the basis of zero evidence. He is in prison because
he and his parents trusted the police officer and the criminal
justice (sic) system.
Another Virginia case is that
of Christophe Gaynor. Gaynor was the coach of an adolescent
skate board team, which he took to New York City for a competition.
One of the adolescents expressed his intention to buy drugs.
Gaynor forbade it and threatened to report the boy to his parents.
The irresponsible kid retaliated
by accusing Gaynor of sex abuse.
There was no evidence. There was no investigation. Gaynor had
never displayed any homosexual tendencies. The entire team knew
the accusation was false. Gaynor went to trial. He was framed
by the prosecutor with the help of the judge, who intimidated
Gaynor's witnesses by incarcerating one of the kids overnight
without cause. Gaynor was sentenced to 32 years with no possibility
of parole on the basis of no evidence, just an unproven accusation.
His trial was full of irregularities, and the same judge who
sentenced him denied Gaynor a new trial.
Ten years later, this past
summer Noah J. Seidenberg, who brought the unproven accusation
against Gaynor, died apparently of drug overdose at the age of
24 years.
There is no institution in
America that is a greater failure than the criminal justice (sic)
system. The system can do nothing but fail, because the search
for truth and justice plays no part in the system. The prosecutor's
career depends on his conviction rate, not on discovering the
guilt or innocence of the accused.
Virginia's governor could pardon
Strong and Gaynor. But feminists and "child advocates"
would scream and yell, as would prosecutors and "law and
order conservatives." Nothing matters to these groups but
their own single-issue, and justice is not part of it. In America
justice cannot be done unless a governor is prepared to sacrifice
his own political career in the interest of justice.
What kind of people are we
when we exercise no oversight over a criminal justice (sic) system
that destroys the lives of innocent people with lies?
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan administration. He was Associate Editor of the
Wall Street Journal editorial page and Contributing Editor of
National Review. He is coauthor of The
Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: paulcraigroberts@yahoo.com
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