And Justice for All: We Must Reverse Our Zeal to Incarcerate

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The movie, Atonement, is a heart-breaking love-story, a historical WWII saga. Without giving away the ending, which must be seen to be adequately felt, it tells the tale of two lovers’ lives irrevocably changed by false testimony against one of them - for a crime he did not commit. Thus, it’s also a condemnation of unreliable witnesses, the willingness of people to believe the worst, particularly of those in a lower economic-class, and the havoc that a false accusation and conviction can wreak upon human life. It’s a film and message that every judge, jury member, and prosecutor should see and consider before convicting or sentencing anyone accused of a crime.

On December 10th, the United States Supreme Court voted 7-2 to recognize a gross injustice with respect to sentencing guidelines which disproportionately penalize those convicted of crack versus cocaine related crimes. The disparity gives equal punishment to a person caught with 5 grams of crack (a poor person’s cocaine) and one caught with 500 grams of coke (a drug dealer’s amount). In their validation of a federal district judge’s below-guideline sentence for a crack case, the Supreme Court reconfirmed the 2005 Booker ruling that federal judges could have more discretion in levying below-guideline sentences. They did not rule on the validity of the guidelines themselves.

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Meanwhile, false convictions, due to witness error, prosecutorial misconduct, inferior defense lawyers or coerced ‘snitching’, continue to destroy multiple generations of lives. They throw the idea of ‘equal protection under the law’ under the same bus as our Declaration of Independence mantra of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’

We’ve simply got to reverse this zeal to incarcerate. The United States has more inmates and a higher incarceration rate than any other nation: more than Russia, South Africa, Mexico, Iran, India, Australia, Brazil and Canada combined.

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December 19th marked the five-year anniversary of the 2002 exoneration of the five ‘perpetrators’ who were originally caught, indicted, and convicted in the infamous Central Park Jogger case. The five black and Hispanic youths, ages 14 to 16 at the time of their imprisonment, were exonerated only after they had spent between 5 and 13 1/2 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. Their freedom came late, even as it was conclusively confirmed by DNA testing results. At the time of their arrests, they confessed to crimes after prolonged interrogation by police.

The Innocence Project counts 210 people, mostly minorities, who have been exonerated post-conviction by conclusive DNA results (350 people have been exonerated including non-DNA related exonerations). Fifteen of them spent time on death row for crimes they did not commit. The average age at the time of their convictions was 26 years old. The average time served was 12 years. The total number of violent crimes that were committed because the real perpetrators were free while the innocent were imprisoned was 74.

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Freedom is a basic human right destroyed by a felony conviction. And in some states, so is the right to vote. Other casualties include the ability to adopt children, find housing or have certain employment. The stigma is permanent. Thus any mistake in a court-room, whether due to a self-serving witness or an ambitious prosecutor, costs someone a part of their life, severing them from the fabric of a justice system designed to protect them. As Martin Luther King said from the Birmingham Jail in 1963, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

The WIP - Read Full Text

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1. Paula Gray - the first and only woman ever exonerated by the Innocence Project

Paula Gray was wrongfully convicted of murder, rape and perjury in 1978 at the age of 17 in the Ford Heights Four case. In a case that involved eyewitness misidentification and false confessions, she became the first and only woman ever exonerated by the Innocence Project in 2002. Photograph courtesy of The Innocence Project.