America’s Injustice System Is Criminal

[fastpat]

America’s Injustice System Is Criminal

by Paul Craig Roberts

The United States has a large number of wrongfully convicted. There are many reasons for this. One is that the US has the largest percentage of its citizens imprisoned of all countries in the world, including China. One of every 32 US adults is behind bars, on probation or on parole.

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, the US has 700,000 more of its citizens incarcerated than China, a country with a population four to five times larger than that of the US, and 1,330,000 more people in prison than crime-ridden Russia. The US has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners. The American incarceration rate is seven times higher than that of European countries. Either America is the land of criminals, or something is seriously wrong with the criminal justice (sic) system in "the land of the free."

In the US the wrongful conviction rate is extremely high. One reason is that hardly any of the convicted have had a jury trial. No peers have heard the evidence against them and found them guilty. In the US criminal justice (sic) system, more than 95% of all felony cases are settled with a plea bargain.

Before jumping to the conclusion that an innocent person would not admit guilt, be aware of how the process works. Any defendant who stands trial faces more severe penalties if found guilty than if he agrees to a plea bargain. Prosecutors don’t like trials because they are time consuming and a lot of work. To discourage trials, prosecutors offer defendants reduced charges and lighter sentences than would result from a jury conviction. In the event a defendant insists upon his innocence, prosecutors pile on charges until the defendant’s lawyer and family convince the defendant that a jury is likely to give the prosecutor a conviction on at least one of the many charges and that the penalty will be greater than a negotiated plea.

The criminal justice (sic) system today consists of a process whereby a defendant is coerced into admitting to a crime in order to escape more severe punishment for maintaining his innocence. Many of the crimes for which people are imprisoned never occurred. They are made up crimes created by the process of negotiation to close a case.

This takes most of the work out of the system and, thereby, suits police, prosecutors, and judges to a tee. Police do not have to be careful about evidence, because they know that no more than one case out of twenty will ever be tested in the courtroom.

Prosecutors do not have to make decisions about which cases to prosecute or risk losing cases. By coercing pleas, prosecutors can prosecute every case and boast of extremely high conviction rates.

When prosecutors had to decide which cases to prosecute, they had to examine the evidence and to investigate the defendant’s side of the story. No more. The evidence seldom comes into play. In place of a determination of innocence or guilt, prosecutors negotiate with lawyers the crimes to which a defendant will enter a plea.

Prosecutors have lost sight of innocence and guilt. What we have today is a conveyor belt that convicts almost everyone who is charged. Every defense attorney knows that today prosecutors can purchase testimony against a defendant by paying a "witness" with money, dropped charges, or reduced time to testify against the defendant. Many prosecutors become highly annoyed at any disruption of the plea bargain conviction process. A defendant that incurs the prosecutor’s ire is certain to be framed on far more serious charges than a negotiated plea.

Going to trial is no guarantee that an innocent person will be acquitted. Prosecutors routinely withhold exculpatory evidence and suborn perjury. Generally, jurors trust prosecutors and are unaware of their inventory of dirty tricks. Few jurors can tell the difference between bogus evidence and real evidence. For example, psychologists and criminologists have established beyond all doubt that eye-witnesses are wrong 50% of the time. Yet, jurors usually believe eye-witnesses unless they think the witness has it in for the defendant and is lying.

Prosecutors – and there are still a few – who are meticulous about their cases and fair to defendants show poor results compared to the high convictions attained by prosecutors who run plea bargain mills and frame-up factories. Today’s criminal justice (sic) system is results orientated, not justice orientated.

In the past judges could give light sentences to people they believed had been wrongfully convicted. But "law and order conservatives" have taken sentencing discretion away from judges. Today prosecutors hold all the cards.

Many conservatives believe that prisons are full of hardened criminals who liberal judges are determined to release to prey upon society. In truth, the largest percentage of prisoners are drug users who are victims of the conservatives’ "war on drugs." Drug offenses account for 49 percent of federal prison population growth between 1995 and 2003. Many of these prisoners are mothers arrested for drug use. The greatest victims of the drug laws are the children whose mothers are incarcerated.

As females become sexually active at younger and younger ages, state legislatures have stupidly raised the age at which it is legal to engage in sexual activity. Today, a significant percentage of new prisoners are young men imprisoned for engaging in sexual activity with teenage girls. In the US, criminal justice (sic) has more to do with ruining people than with punishing criminals.

I have written often about wrongful convictions. We know that wrongful conviction is a serious problem when the advent of DNA evidence has led to the release of a significant number of innocent people who were convicted of murderer and rape, and when a number of law schools feel that it is necessary for them to operate innocence projects that work for the release of the wrongfully convicted.

Prosecutors are like President Bush. They absolutely refuse to admit that they ever make a mistake and have to be forced to disgorge their innocent victims. Nothing makes a prosecutor more angry than to have to give back a wrongfully convicted person’s life.

Lt. William Strong and Christophe Gaynor are two of the hundreds of thousands of wrongfully convicted Americans whose lives have been ruined by an irresponsible and corrupt criminal justice (sic) system.

In Virginia, Lt. William Strong, the son of a military family, grew tired of his wife’s unfaithfulness and filed for divorce. The unfaithful wife retaliated by accusing Strong of marital rape. Neither police nor prosecutor investigated the charge. Instead, they proceeded to set Strong up for plea conviction. The arresting officer recommended Strong’s attorney, an incompetent who owed his cases to the police.

Strong insisted on a trial, but the arresting officer and attorney convinced Strong’s parents that with a plea their son would be out in a year. No one told Strong or his parents the implications of a plea, and Virginia Judge Westbrook Parker, playing to feminist voters, gave Strong a life sentence of 60 years.

The case has many unsavory appearances. If reports are true, the arresting officer paid numerous visits to Strong’s unfaithful wife, as did Strong’s attorney, and the arresting officer ended up separating from his wife and leaving the police force.

The perk kit exists and Strong could be given a DNA test, but Virginia refuses on the grounds that Strong admitted his guilt. Strong says the semen, if any, is that of the wife’s boyfriend.

Strong has been in prison for 15 years on the basis of zero evidence. He is in prison because he and his parents trusted the police officer and the criminal justice (sic) system.

Another Virginia case is that of Christophe Gaynor. Gaynor was the coach of an adolescent skate board team, which he took to New York City for a competition. One of the adolescents expressed his intention to buy drugs. Gaynor forbade it and threatened to report the boy to his parents.

The irresponsible kid retaliated by accusing Gaynor of sex abuse. There was no evidence. There was no investigation. Gaynor had never displayed any homosexual tendencies. The entire team knew the accusation was false. Gaynor went to trial. He was framed by the prosecutor with the help of the judge, who intimidated Gaynor’s witnesses by incarcerating one of the kids overnight without cause. Gaynor was sentenced to 32 years with no possibility of parole on the basis of no evidence, just an unproven accusation. His trial was full of irregularities, and the same judge who sentenced him denied Gaynor a new trial.

Ten years later, this past summer Noah J. Seidenberg, who brought the unproven accusation against Gaynor, died apparently of drug overdose at the age of 24 years.

There is no institution in America that is a greater failure than the criminal justice (sic) system. The system can do nothing but fail, because the search for truth and justice plays no part in the system. The prosecutor’s career depends on his conviction rate, not on discovering the guilt or innocence of the accused.

Virginia’s governor could pardon Strong and Gaynor. But feminists and "child advocates" would scream and yell, as would prosecutors and "law and order conservatives." Nothing matters to these groups but their own single-issue, and justice is not part of it. In America justice cannot be done unless a governor is prepared to sacrifice his own political career in the interest of justice.

What kind of people are we when we exercise no oversight over a criminal justice (sic) system that destroys the lives of innocent people with lies?

Paul Craig Roberts

[Nostril Cheese]

I accuse goody pat!

[MRM]

Anyone can convict a guilty person. When I was prosecuting I was always most proud of my work when I convicted an innocent guy. That's when you know you are really using your skills as a lawyer. It's kind of like beating a faster car in a race.

[FrayAdjacent911]

Things like the guy in Atlanta that was recently arrested and spent 3 days in jail for not payin child support...... and he doesn't have any kids!! He has a similar first and last name to a guy wanted for not paying child support, but has a different birthdate, address, and physical attributes, yet they arrested him anyway.

Combined with a lot of wrong house drug raids...

Yeah, we have problems.

[m21sniper]

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, the US has 700,000 more of its citizens incarcerated than China, a country with a population four to five times larger than that of the US, and 1,330,000 more people in prison than crime-ridden Russia.

Those numbers are simply incomprehensible, and should trouble any American deeply.

[m21sniper]

Originally posted by MRM
Anyone can convict a guilty person. When I was prosecuting I was always most proud of my work when I convicted an innocent guy. That's when you know you are really using your skills as a lawyer. It's kind of like beating a faster car in a race.

Let me guess, 'prosecutorial humor', right?

Not funny.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by m21sniper
Let me guess, 'prosecutorial humor', right?

Not funny.

Don't worry, he regularly shats into the wind, getting it all over himself, same for noseCheese. They can't help themselves.

[m21sniper]

His comments were imaginative, and on a different topic would have been very funny, but not on this topic, and doubly so because he was a prosecutor.

These numbers should make any US prosecutor soul search, not talk smack.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by m21sniper
His comments were imaginative, and on a different topic would have been very funny, but not on this topic, and doubly so because he was a prosecutor.

These numbers should make any US prosecutor soul search, not talk smack.

I don't think he's even a lawyer, much less a bottom-of-the-heap prosecutor.

Be that as it may, you're quite right, we Americans have to remedy this, and quickly too. The momentum is exactly the opposite today, so simply reversing current trends is a start.

Roberts book The Tyranny of Good Intentions is a good read, as is Judge Andrew Napolitano's The Constitution in Exile: How the Federal Government Has Seized Power by Rewriting the Supreme Law of the Land, Judge Napolitano is a frequent guest on FauxNews, one of the few I can stomach for long.

[m21sniper]

Good luck with that...

[Nostril Cheese]

Originally posted by fastpat
Don't worry, he regularly shats into the wind, getting it all over himself, same for noseCheese. They can't help themselves.

(blows a huge fecal "A" on pats chest)

[Super_Dave_D]

According to the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College in London, the US has 700,000 more of its citizens incarcerated than China, a country with a population four to five times larger than that of the US, and 1,330,000 more people in prison than crime-ridden Russia.

I agree that there is a problem here and you hear about it all of the time. I cant help but wonder, do the lower stats in China and Russia look like this due to lack of enforcement OR in China and Russia do people just disappear, never to be seen again???

[MRM]

Yes that was humor. Don't worry, I am both a lawyer and former prosecutor and I had much to much to do dealing with guilty people to spend time on the innocent. My response comes from a time I came back from losing a court of appeals case as a young lawyer after getting a conviction at trial. It was important to me and I took the reversal hard. One of the supervisors tried to cheer me up by saying that anyone could convict the guilty, but it was hard to convict an innocent guy. My guy wasn't innocent, I had two independent witnesses, but the court reversed the conviction anyway.

This thread reminded me of that case. I enjoy Pat's rantings, he reminds me of an uncle I grew up with, and I knew that my response would get under his skin. Which is only fair, because usually his posts are designed to get under other people's skin.

The Department of Justice does study wrongful convictions. Their best estimate is that between one and five percentof people incarcerated did not commit the crime they are in jail for. That number has remained fairly constant, and is probably the accuracy rate of our jury system. The number of innocent people in jail reflects the large number of people in America who are in jail. The DOJ does not have any bright ideas about how to reduce the proportion of innocent people in jail, other than to make sure the standard procedural safeguards are in place. I have thought a lot about it too, and I haven't come up with any better bright ideas.

I have long ago decided that the better side of any argument is the other side of Pat's, which is why he casts dispersions in my directions. If anyone laughed at the thread suggesting that killing all lawyers is a good idea, then my humor should be like water off a duck's back.

[m21sniper]

So what are you saying friend...that we should accept as much as a 5% wrongful imprisonment rate because 'we're doing our best'?

If that's the case, 'your best' sucks, and Shakespeare was surely justified in his comments.

I dont even know how you can do a job where 1 in 20 lives that you're intentionally destroying belongs to an innocent man.

[MRM]

If you have any better ideas than America's jury trial system, go ahead and suggest them. Our confrontational system gets it right betwwen 95 and 99% of the time. I did not say I was satisfied with that percentage; no one is satisfied with anything less that 100% justice. I just said I don't know a better way to get it right more of the time. That's why we have well paid public defenders, judges, courts of appeals, the right to habeus corpus appeals to the US district court, and lawyer-funded and volunteer-staffed organizations like Project Innocence. I venture to say that in my part of the country where the court system is well run and very professional that the false conviction rate is considerably lower. I know the judicial systems in the states where I am licensed compare very favorably to the systems in certain southern states.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by MRM
If you have any better ideas than America's jury trial system, go ahead and suggest them. Our confrontational system gets it right betwwen 95 and 99% of the time. I did not say I was satisfied with that percentage; no one is satisfied with anything less that 100% justice. I just said I don't know a better way to get it right more of the time. That's why we have well paid public defenders, judges, courts of appeals, the right to habeus corpus appeals to the US district court, and lawyer-funded and volunteer-staffed organizations like Project Innocence. I venture to say that in my part of the country where the court system is well run and very professional that the false conviction rate is considerably lower. I know the judicial systems in the states where I am licensed compare very favorably to the systems in certain southern states.

Evidence?

[m21sniper]

Originally posted by MRM
If you have any better ideas than America's jury trial system, go ahead and suggest them. Our confrontational system gets it right betwwen 95 and 99% of the time. I did not say I was satisfied with that percentage; no one is satisfied with anything less that 100% justice. I just said I don't know a better way to get it right more of the time. That's why we have well paid public defenders, judges, courts of appeals, the right to habeus corpus appeals to the US district court, and lawyer-funded and volunteer-staffed organizations like Project Innocence. I venture to say that in my part of the country where the court system is well run and very professional that the false conviction rate is considerably lower. I know the judicial systems in the states where I am licensed compare very favorably to the systems in certain southern states.

The entire thing is extremely troubling, but i would suggest that the 'war on drugs' has run it's course, and it's time to start SERIOUSLY looking at legalizing some of these drugs.

I work in the inner city, so i know full well how bad crack, crank, herioine, and coke are, and would probably not agree to the legalization of those drugs under almost any circumstances, but certainly marijuana has been proven to be almost totally harmless, and in reality(or at least according to popular legend) was only banned so DuPont could sell his nylon rope in a 'captive' market, so to speak. How many people go to jail on pot offenses every year? 100,000? More? Time to put an end to those 'crimes' and focus on more important crimes i think.

And i think we need to move away- far, far away- from the militant mindset of modern law enforcement. I am also dubious of most gun control laws as well.

One thing the article did mention that i thought was interesting was the 'pile on charges to force a plea' phenomenon.

This strikes me as a highly dishonest intellectual process, designed to 'save the state the time' to actually PROVE a man is guilty, and extorting a man into accepting a lesser charge to avoid having his entire life wrongly STOLEN from him by the Gov't.

These things are only abstract to us. All accross america hundreds of thousands of innocent people are in jail right now....and they will still be there on Xmas morning. Some will never breathe the free air again.

Ever. Imagine it was you.

There has to be a better way than we're doing it.

Edit: Gambling laws are ridiculously stupid too, and for that matter, so is prostitution.

I think i just removed a million arrests plus a year from your case log...in 5 minutes.

[fastpat]

Originally posted by 335I_guy
Somewhere, somehow, Somebody must have kicked you around some. Who knows? Maybe you were kidnapped,
Tied up, taken away, and held for ransom.

And then you woke, up, sweating profusely, embarassed to talk to anyone.

[Lothar]

It is no wonder to me that we have more people convicted and incarcerated in this country given two facts:

1. We have more freakin laws that any other country. Isn't it amazing that, for a relatively young republic, we have buried ourselves in law upon law. No one can make much sense out of most of them and once passed, they never, ever go away. How can one not run afoul of some law?

2. Our "War on Drugs" is a miserable failure and the government has to have someone to hang out to dry.

I think the new food related laws are really part of the war on drugs. Can't you see some pot smoker being arrested for eating a twinkie on his couch?

We couldn't find any drugs, but the defendant was eating a twinkie that contained trans-fat. Book him Danno.

[jorian]

Wars = $

War on drugs, terror, fat, whatever........

The incarceration biz is also big $.

Legislators should have to remove 2 laws for every new one enacted.