Timothy Coles was innocent.  Timothy Coles is dead.  There are three shames here and each needs to be realized. 

From the AP, via Dan Solove’s post at Concurring Opinions :

A man who died in prison while serving time for a rape he didn’t commit was cleared Friday by a judge who called the state’s first posthumous DNA exoneration “the saddest case” he’d ever seen. . . .

[Timothy] Cole was convicted of raping a Texas Tech University student in Lubbock in 1985 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. He died in 1999 at age 39 from asthma complications.

DNA tests in 2008 connected the crime to Jerry Wayne Johnson, who is serving life in prison for separate rapes. Johnson testified in court Friday that he was the rapist in Cole’s case and asked the victim and Cole’s family to forgive him. . . .

A double tragedy, for the rape victim and Timothy Coles.  Grits for Breakfast provides more details on the case and exoneration.

The third tragedy is expressed in Dan’s post, that the system exacts a terrible toll on the innocent defendant. 

This case illustrates how our criminal justice system punishes the innocent more harshly than the guilty. This phenomenon occurs because of several rules and practices:

1. The federal sentencing guidelines and sentencing guidelines in many states provides for reductions in sentences for “acceptance of responsibility.” The innocent defendant, who refuses to admit to the crime, will not receive this benefit.

2. An innocent defendant might often refuse to accept a guilty plea deal. When the innocent defendant defends his or her innocence at trial and gets wrongly convicted, that defendant will invariably receive a much higher punishment than that proposed in the plea deal.

3. An innocent defendant, by not admitting to his or her crime, might hurt his or her chance for an early release from prison.

This is not an accident, but by design.  Coles was offered probation if only he would plead guilty.  Coles had a shot a parole, if only he was acknowledge his wrong.  Coles was innocent.  The system cannot accommodate an innocent person.  Despite the rhetoric, it presumes everyone arrested is guilty.  It does everything possible to coerce a plea of guilty and punish anyone who tests the system.  It purports to demand truth, but only rewards lies when the defendant is innocent.  This is by design.

The argument in favor of this design is that the vast majority of defendant are guilty, at least to some extent, and hence the incentives push the right people in the right direction.  This is fine with folks who believe that an imperfect system, as long as it doesn’t touch them or their loved ones, is acceptable.  They are perfectly happy if a few innocent defendants are required take a bullet for the team.  It’s the price of putting all the bad guys away, and they are all too happy to pay the price with someone else’s life.

It has long been my belief that the degree of vehemence with which a defendant protests his innocence, in the face of evidence to the contrary, suggests that he’s either truly innocent or truly insane.  It’s not evidence.  It’s hardly the sort of thing one can use at trial to make the point.  It’s just a belief. 

We live with a legal fiction that tells us that a defendant who is convicted of a crime after trial is guilty.  We do this because this is the rule of the game.  It doesn’t make him guilty.  But he’s guilty nonetheless.  Until one day, he suddenly becomes innocent.  This is one crappy system, unless you belong to the group of people who find an imperfect system acceptable.  I do not.

While my belief that convicting innocent people is an unacceptable price to pay to get the bad guys may not be shared by all, perhaps even the other team can agree that the system need not exact so harsh a price from those who challenge it, who protest their innocence, who do not cave in to the overwhelming pressure to admit guilt for a crime they did not commit.  Just in case the other team is wrong.