Garbage In, Garbage Out

The New York Times offers one of its occasional editorials decrying the death penalty by pointing out that nobody wants innocent people executed.

And yet, far too often, people end up on death row after being convicted of horrific crimes they did not commit. The lucky ones are exonerated while they are still alive — a macabre club that has grown to include 152 members since 1973.

The rest remain locked up for life in closet-size cells. Some die there of natural causes; in at least two documented cases, inmates who were almost certainly innocent were put to death.

If the innocent on death row are a macabre club, what about its auxiliary, the tens of thousands of people convicted and imprisoned shy of death by the same system?

How many more innocent people have met the same fate, or are awaiting it? That may never be known. But over the past 42 years, someone on death row has been exonerated, on average, every three months. According to one study, at least 4 percent of all death-row inmates in the United States have been wrongfully convicted. That is far more than often enough to conclude that the death penalty — besides being cruel, immoral, and ineffective at reducing crime — is so riddled with error that no civilized nation should tolerate its use.

Absolutely, a system that fails to produce sufficiently accurate outcomes isn’t viable to serve as the foundation for the taking of a life, assuming you’re otherwise cool about the concept of executing people to sate the bloodlust of the ignorant.

But sentence isn’t the outcome. Guilt is. A conviction is what flows from a flawed system, and the sentence is what’s heaped upon a defendant after the fate is determined.

Innocent people get convicted for many reasons, including bad lawyering, mistaken identifications and false confessions made under duress. But as advances in DNA analysis have accelerated the pace of exonerations, it has also become clear that prosecutorial misconduct is at the heart of an alarming number of these cases.

In the past year alone, nine people who had been sentenced to death were released — and in all but one case, prosecutors’ wrongdoing played a key role.

Nine people were sentenced to death. How many people were convicted but sentenced to a fate less than death?  How many were sentenced to slow death?

Why does this keep happening? In a remarkable letter to the editor published last month in The Shreveport Times, A.M. Stroud III, a former prosecutor in Louisiana’s Caddo Parish, offered a chillingly frank answer: “Winning became everything.”

Jeff Gamso posted the video of Stroud, confessing his role in the conviction of innocent Glenn Ford.  It opens with an idea that may go more to the core of the problem.

The government is responsible for patching potholes. And they’re not very good at it.

The development of the system upon which we rely for the determination of which lives are to be thrown into a hole is a series of pothole patches.  An issue arises, and some court deals with it.  Pothole by pothole, our system has moved and wriggled and changed over time to address issues of evidence, disclosure, fairness and ultimately what to do with these people who, we’re told, are unworthy of living amongst us.

Unfortunately, that message is unlikely to be heeded in places where it needs to be heard most — in Caddo Parish itself, for example, which sentences more people to death per capita than anywhere else in the country. Responding to the searing honesty of Mr. Stroud’s letter, the parish’s current first assistant district attorney, Dale Cox, offered up some candor of his own: “I’m a believer that the death penalty serves society’s interest in revenge,” Mr. Cox told The Shreveport Times. “I think we need to kill more people.”

Presumably, the good people of Caddo Parish agree or there would be regime change.  But is the Times kidding itself when it drops the bomb on Caddo Parish?  Does it surmise that the rest of the country, some part of this nation, does it so much better that innocent people are never convicted?

The all-too-common mind-set to win at all costs has facilitated the executions of people like Cameron Todd Willingham or Carlos DeLuna, whose convictions have been convincingly debunked in recent years. And that mind-set led to the wrongful conviction of people like Mr. Hinton, Mr. Ford and Henry Lee McCollum, who was exonerated last year after spending three decades on North Carolina’s death row.

Perhaps there is some delusion that prosecutors are less inclined to the “win at all costs” mindset in places like New York, where they don’t talk with those funky southern accents that tend to make northerners think they’re country bumpkins, too stupid to be enlightened and drink cosmos and martinis.

Stroud’s mea culpa, while brutally revealing, is neither proof of why the system as a whole has gone off the rails, nor the overarching data point that provides a solution.  There are bad dudes out there, and the job of prosecutor is to get them off the street and protect others from the harm they cause.  It’s the same attitude, whether described as “win at all costs” or save the public from someone the prosecutors believe to be dangerous and deserving, that pushed the need to convict.  We applaud it when we like the outcome, and the Times writes editorials when it doesn’t.

But it’s so much easier to limit our attention to the small slice of the system that ends in a sentence of execution, so as not to notice the tens of thousand of people under less severe sentence but just as wrongfully convicted.  And it’s so much easier to pinpoint “a problem” when the system is no better than a Rube Goldberg machine constructed over hundreds of years by many thousands of robed builders, most of whom care only about the tinker toy bit they attach without ever considering whether their addition to the machine makes its efficient functioning more difficult. Or even impossible.

Or a road filled with potholes that have been poorly patched.

4 thoughts on “Garbage In, Garbage Out

  1. Neil Dunn

    Your delineation of the problem is considerably larger than I suspected. Besides DNA analysis, what are realistic approaches to improve the situation besides more asphalt?

  2. Wrongway

    I heard of this guy Barry something or other.. thru some trial in the 90’s, & heard of this thing called the “Innocence Project”.. where a bunch of rich law school college brats decided to buck the system, & had gotten like 5 guys off of death row in a pretty short amount of time.. They put out a book about it & I got copy of the audio book.. (I’m a truck driver, & no don’t ask me the title of the book..) And what I heard freaked me out to learn just how easy it was & just how bad it was within the system of these specific cases. Well, I got the book and read it. The Very 1st thought that hit was,”if it’s this bad with this many judges, juries, guaranteed appeals,.. how bad is it for the guy caught speeding, or the jaywalker ?? this is the norm..”
    And then I just started paying attention. Not really to any one aspect, but just in general..
    And that’s how I wound up here..

    DAMMIT !~!~!~!

  3. lawrence kaplan

    Society need its blood steaming hot
    Let’s extract every tittle and jot.
    It’s revenge that we need
    We must kill at full speed
    Who cares if they’re guilty or not!

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