The Tragedy of Innocence
How can it be tragic to be innocent? Perhaps when someone has been wrongly convicted of a crime and spends many years in prison, sometimes on death row, only to be freed when it’s found that he didn’t commit the crime.
I recently read John Grisham’s The Innocent Man
The convictions of Williamson and Fritz resulted from incompetence, venality, sloppiness, prejudice, and egotism on the part of the Ada, Oklahoma police, prosecutor, and courts. Oklahoma state investigators and criminalists helped along the way. Despite the emergence of clear evidence of their innocence, based on DNA testing, it took a lot of hard work by a conscientious federal judge and his staff to finally have their freedom restored.
Williamson and Fritz were convicted on the basis of ludicrous “dream” confessions, the clearly false testimony of jailhouse snitches, other perjured testimony, and invalid testimony by an “expert” about hairs found at the scene of the crime. In addition, the prosecutor withheld exculpatory information from the defense, and the judge ruled that evidence indicating their innocence could not be presented during the trial. Beyond all that, Williamson was not mentally competent to stand trial, an issue that his court-appointed lawyer inexplicably failed to pursue.
When finally set free, Williamson had spent over 11 years on death row, at one point coming within five days of execution.
It would be one thing if these cases were rare, but they aren’t. When Williamson moved onto Oklahoma’s death row, he became one of five inmates condemned to death who would later be proven innocent. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 139 people sentenced to death in 26 states have been found to be innocent. Of course, that begs the question, how many innocent people have been executed? The simple fact is we’ll never know.
Many exonerations of death row inmates have come through the work of the Innocence Project, which relies on DNA testing to prove innocence. It’s chilling to read the long list of people, some of them sentenced to death, who have been proven innocent by DNA test results. But we have to remember that DNA isn’t always available at crime scenes, and people wrongly convicted in such cases have little chance of ever proving their innocence.
Oklahoma and many of its citizens are ardent supporters of the death penalty, executing more people per capita that any other state, including Texas and Virginia. It was the first state to adopt lethal injection, and many Oklahomans were disappointed that their state wasn’t the first to actually use that “modern” method of killing their fellow citizens. Grisham details the entire technical process of execution in Oklahoma; reading that dispassionate explanation of the process is deeply unsettling.
But it isn’t just Oklahoma. Every state that executes people and the federal government have almost certainly killed innocent people in the past. How long can a supposedly civilized society tolerate this moral outrage?
I’m strongly opposed to the death penalty, as I made clear in an earlier article. Until it doesn’t matter how much money a defendant has and the criminal justice system never makes mistakes, we will continue to convict and sometimes execute innocent people. Even if the system were error-free and the identity and means of defendants weren’t issues, it would remain a mystery how anyone could consider it morally right for the government to methodically kill its citizens.
(This article was also published at Opinion Forum.)
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Fair point, Tom, however, that was my opinion and nothing else, so it is, more than likely, wrong. I disagree on disarming people on the basis of this: most criminals are cowards and can be dissuaded from a crime (I’m going to use muggings as my example) by something as simple as a cane or umbrella. If that stands as truth, then wouldn’t it make more sense to allow the citizens to carry their own arms? If every criminal knew their potential target was carrying a weapon of some type and they were risking their lives for what is most likely little more than a few bucks (since people rarely carry cash anymore and credit cards can be deactivated almost immediately), would there still be such rampant crimes as opposed to now where you have to pay and undergo strict courses just to carry a weapon while criminals freely purchase and carry weapons of all kinds, despite bans on them? Would a two-bit thug with a pistol still think to rob a convenience store if he knew that the clerk could easily pull a shotgun on him and shoot back? Answer me that. The only people restrictions on weapon ownership hurt are law-abiding citizens like you and me, not the criminals.
Now, as for the rest of my post, I’ll admit I got a little carried away; I tend to go into tangents about things like this until I get so far off the topic, if you read only my post (and not what I was replying to), you’d have no clue what the point was. Ah, well, that’s life; You make your choices and stand-by them until you realize you’re wrong and can only say you’re sorry. A little off topic, but still related your response, I would spend time in other countries (because I would love to visit another country and revel in their culture), but in plain speaking, I be flat broke.
JJ, I’m not sure we’re sending too many people to prison. Maybe we could do more to influence the behavior that results in people being incarcerated, but once they commit the crime, they ought to do the time. That includes life without parole for the kinds of crimes that sometimes result in the death penalty, depending on which state you live in.
As far as prisons themselves are concerned, there are many things we need to do to get them under control.
Vincent, you lost me. Prohibiting people from walking around with guns isn’t dictatorial; it’s the right thing to do. And people in the U.S. certainly aren’t treated like sheep, nor is the government afraid of some kind of armed revolt (if that’s what you mean). You need to spend some time in other countries.
.-= Tom Carter´s last blog ..Taxpayer Funding for Abortions =-.
I think JJ said much of what I had in mind after reading this, but the simple fact is that our government is so afraid of us, its citizens, that they implement dictatorial restrictions on us (for example, our right to keep and bear arms, which by all rights should allow citizens the freedom to carry a weapon of any type (within reason, no matter how funny it’d be to see someone try and drag a howitzer down the street) without the state’s permission; and, as we all know, a disarmament and weapons ban is the first thing a dictatorship does to its citizens), they keep us confused and disorganized so they can leach off our blood, sweat, and tears while they do nothing but lie through their teeth at us, yet still managing to keep us moderately organized enough to turn us into disposable assets to be shipped off to some foreign country that we have some issue with while conveniently ignoring what we’re actually fighting for (oil, in the case of the current Iraqi war, or another country having nuclear arms, in the case of the pending Iranian war).
All we are to our government are toss-away sheep. We’re to be de-horned or de-toothed and sheared by our shepherds until the wolves (i.e. criminals) catch us with our only hopes being that our mighty (and ineffective) watchdogs (police) will catch that mean old wolf and hang him out to dry so our sheep families can have solace. We’re living in a state of fear; we fear crime, but we’re too afraid of the consequences to protect ourselves (as is our unalienable right; the right to life), too afraid to be ourselves in case it conflicts with public opinion, and our government is so afraid we’ll replace them that they water us with a healthy dose of fear through their puppet, the media.
Good piece Tom. I’ve never liked the death penalty for a variety of reasons. I think the funniest part is that many religious Americans support it in the name of “punishing evil” without regard to all the innocent who are affected by this notion. They also seem to forget about the other concepts in their religion such as forgiveness, humility, second chances, and what not.
Ironically they just announced that the US prison population is going down this year for the first time since 1972. Ridiculous. America jails more people than any nation in the world. Oh, but its fine to release them for a draft, or when the budget is tight. Talk about two-faced, our justice system is the most hypocritical and corrupt part of our country by far.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091219/ap_on_re_us/us_prison_population