Blind Injustice

As many as 100,000 wrongfully convicted people sit in jail for crimes they did not commit.  That means, of course, that there are 100,000 guilty folks wandering around. Estimates of wrongful convictions range between 2 and 5 percent. Death row exonerations have, at last count, reached 162. Since 1989, when what’s known today as the innocence movement started gaining momentum, over 2,737 convicted people have been exonerated in the United States, according to the 2021 Annual Report of the National Registry of Exonerations.**  129 were exonerated in 2020 alone.  Of those, 87 were convicted because of official misconduct. Those 129 lost a total of 1,737 years, or an average of 13.4 years per defendant, off their lives.  87 of the convictions were due to official misconduct.  80% of the murder convictions were marred by official misconduct.

Mark Godsey, a former prosecutor, now the co-founder of the Ohio Innocence Project explains how this can happen in his book Blind Injustice: A Former Prosecutor Exposes the Psychology and Politics of Wrongful Convictions. He writes:

From my perch as a prosecutor turned innocence advocate, I have witnessed bizarre human behavior that has left me both fascinated and shaken. I have seen how witnesses get it wrong but adamantly believe they are right. How witnesses have their stories twisted and rearranged by the police and prosecutors, without even realizing they have been manipulated and without the police and prosecutors realizing they have altered witnesses’ statements to fit their theory of the case. How prosecutors, police, judges, and defense attorneys develop tunnel vision and make irrational case-decisions because they refuse—no matter the evidence—to question their initial instincts. How politics and internal pressures have caused people in the system to act unjustly and unfairly, all the while in denial about their true motivations. How they have become stubborn and arrogant about their ability to divine the truth, while they are in denial about their human limitations. And I have seen how these human flaws have resulted in tragic, gut-wrenching injustices.

For example, detectives tend to believe witnesses who tell them stories that confirm their own beliefs about a case. Witnesses who give contradictory information are seen as lying or mistaken and are often pushed to the wayside. 

The Supreme Court has played an increasingly remote role in overlooking state courts, making appeals from inmates more and more difficult.  Their current view is that SCOTUS has only a very narrow responsibility in supervising the quality of justice in state courts. In 1993 Justice O'Connor made what can only be considered a most naive statement in Herrera v Collins that denied intervening in a Texas death penalty case.

It's not only naïveté and federalistic myopia that can deny hope to death row inmates. Rigid adherence to paperwork timelines can also be a hindrance, as Justice Thomas recognized in a 2007 opinion:

 "Just a few months ago, the Clerk, pursuant to this Court's Rule 13.2, refused to accept a petition for certiorari submitted by Ryan Heath Dickson because it had been filed one day late ... Dickson was executed on April 26, 2007, without any Member of this Court having even seen his petition for certiorari. The rejected certiorari petition was Dickson's first in this Court, and one can only speculate as to whether denial of that petition would have been a foregone conclusion."

For a review of Bryan Stevenson's work in getting wrongful convictions overturned, see my review in these pages at https://rarebits.blogspot.com/search?q=bryan+stevenson.

 

**https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/2021AnnualReport.pdf