Criminal Justice Reform Must Address Wrongful Convictions
By: Carl L Lane
Tags: Politics, Crime, America, Criminal Justice Reform, Life

Criminal Justice Reform Must Address Wrongful Convictions

Photo by RODNAE Productions from Pexels

They are the sacrificial lambs of America’s blood lust. The wrongfully convicted. Their cases illustrate the most urgent need for criminal justice reform. Their lives are worth nothing to us. Their deaths are mere formalities. Their children are the ones we have decided should grow up fatherless. And every bit of data we have indicates that these children are much more likely to wind up in the prison system themselves as a result of what we have done to their fathers.

We see the headlines almost daily: ten, twenty, sometimes more than forty years spent in prison for crimes they didn’t commit. Decades are stolen from their lives by a criminal justice system that is not so much broken, as it is expertly designed to take advantage of the American presumption of guilt over innocence. It is foolish to believe that the innocent have not died in our gas chambers or at the ends of our needles. We search for their veins like hungry serpents.

With an incoming Biden administration, many are hopeful that we will finally have real, meaningful criminal justice reform. Of course this depends greatly on how the two senate runoffs come out in the state of Georgia. But even if the Democrats were to somehow win both of those races, making a Vice President Kamala Harris the deciding vote in the U.S. Senate, we still need to get the members of congress, Republican and Democrat alike, to think of the lost lives of the wrongfully convicted as worth saving. They need to understand that to rob someone of twenty or thirty years for a crime they didn’t commit is tantamount to murder.

And we are all guilty of their murders, both those murders that come in death chambers while journalists and vengeful families look on, and those that come after many years of proclaiming one’s innocence to unhearing ears and uncaring hearts. All of our hands are stained with their blood. We are the thieves of their futures, the murderers of their possibilities.

Most of the wrongfully convicted in America will never get a chance to prove their innocence. Talk of criminal justice reform usually doesn’t even mention what we have done to them. Most prisoners have their requests for DNA testing denied. And most states typically discard DNA evidence that could possibly free the innocent, after the trials are done. We sweep their bones under our rugs. Their lives lack importance to us.

So their families are left to watch them die slowly and painfully for the crimes of others. Children are fathered over collect phone calls and in prison visiting rooms, if at all. The beatings and the rapes these innocent men suffer while they are in prison are the crimes of which we, the American public, are all guilty. Wrongful convictions happen in our name, and they continue because of the violence of our silence.

While it is true that most of criminal justice reform must happen at the state level, President Biden and the U.S. Congress must make the cases of the wrongfully convicted a part of the national conversation. Silence is complicity. Prosecutors and police officers who blatantly disregard the rule of law or value a winning record over the pursuit of actual justice, must be held criminally responsible for their crimes.

In my home state of Texas, the exonerated can receive no more than $50,000 of compensation for each of the years that we have stolen from their lives, and there is a maximum of $500,000 total that may be awarded to our victims, regardless of how much time they have served for crimes they are not guilty of. Even this pitiful sum in subject to federal taxes.

To receive this they must sign away their right to sue. Sure, they could forgo the states compensation money and go to the courts on their own, but since these people are usually released with no money, having not held a job for years, most of them are not in a financial position to wait while the civil cases wind themselves through the court system. The civil cases can take years to resolve. So most take the money because they really have no choice.

So the value of a year stolen from the life of an innocent American is fifty thousand dollars, thirty five after taxes. I once knew someone who got seventy five for breaking an ankle after slipping on a wet floor in a department store. The numbers are different from state to state, but most states have laws that limit their financial liabilities in these cases.

The circumstances of these cases vary, but they are most often the result of a combination of mistaken eyewitness testimony, corrupt police and overzealous prosecutors. A 2008 article in Texas Monthly, entitled The Exonerated, lists the cases of thirty seven men who had been wrongfully convicted in the state of Texas. It is a hard read.

The reader is both angry and sad for the victims and the families they often lose as a result of their wrongful convictions. The tears do not come easily to your eyes, but they do come, jagged and sharp. In a number of the cases, the circumstances seem as if prosecutors were not even interested in justice.

Gregory Wayne Wallis served 17 years in prison for a rape that DNA evidence later proved he didn’t commit. The victim had described her attacker as having a scar on his cheek and a tattoo of a woman with long hair on his back. Wallis had a scar on his forehead and a tattoo of a long haired woman on his arm. Still, the victim picked him out of a photo lineup.

Brandon Moon also served 17 years in a Texas prison for a rape he didn’t commit. He was picked out of a photo lineup, then later out of a live lineup by the victim. He was the only person in both lineups.

Larry Fuller served nineteen and a half years in prison after being identified by a rape victim. Fuller had a full beard, but the victim had described her rapist as clean shaven. The list goes on and on.

Weekly, often daily, we hear about more and more of the innocent who have been freed with the help of the non-profit organization, The Innocence Project, which helps the wrongfully convicted get DNA testing. What is perhaps most troubling in these cases is that a number of the men who have been freed with the help of The Innocence Project and others, were freed from sentences of life imprisonment or even the death penalty.

The Innocence Project was only founded in 1992, and DNA testing only became common place around the same time. Most of the sophisticated tests that have successfully proven the innocence of a number of the wrongfully convicted did not become common until the early 2000’s. Yet the death penalty was reinstated in the United States back in 1976. As a country, we’ve executed 1,516 inmates since then, as of July 2020. Since 1973 there have been 170 innocent people freed from death row in America.

What of the others?

In almost all of the cases I read about, prosecutors fought to prevent these men from getting DNA testing. Paid doctors have been found guilty of perjuring themselves in testifying to the supposed guilt of innocent men.

Many of their parents have died while they were in prison. They died thinking they had raised a rapist, murderer or both. These innocent men have often lost their marriages, their wives wanting nothing to do with men they’d been told were rapists or murderers. Their children had come to consider them dead.

Fifty thousand a year, thirty five after taxes as payment for the fact that your children despise you. Thirty five after taxes as payment for having your children grow up calling another man “Dad.”

To kill someone is to deprive them of life. It is to rob them of those moments when their life would find its meaning. It is to deprive them of birthdays and graduations and walking daughters down wedding isles. It is to surgically remove the sweetness of life. To murder someone is to take all of these moments from them without just cause.

We are murderers.

As the lives of these men are stolen, the lives of the police and prosecutors who are their executioners go on. The police officer will go out for a beer with friends later that night. Maybe he will brag about the case to his buddies. The prosecutors will relax at home with their own children, maybe have a glass of wine with their husband or wife.

Even years later, when their crimes are discovered, the cop will still be a cop; the prosecutor will still be a lawyer. The only one who will pay any cost for what has happened is the innocent man they sent to prison. His suffering will never end. What they have taken from him can never be given back.

The years when he might have gone to college or traveled the world, are long since gone. The times he might have sat in the stands of a stadium and watched proudly as his daughter played in the big game, are no more than a fantasy. The grandchildren may have been told that he is dead because it seemed like the best thing to do. No one wants to be the family of a rapist or a murderer.

But we all go on with our lives. We see their stories in our social media feeds, and we think we are being generous when we leave a crying emoji or even one with a bright red heart at the news of their release. We go on feigning innocence because the crimes that were committed against them in our names made us feel safe.

We scroll on to the next story because we do not know them personally. Our own families were not destroyed by what was done to them. But we are all as guilty as sin, and the stains from their blood can never be washed from our hands. Criminal justice reform must not forget about them.