A comprehensive study of 328 criminal cases over the last 15 years in which the convicted person was exonerated suggests that there are thousands of innocent people in prison today.That is, the greater scrutiny that murder and rape cases get - with capital crimes getting the most - increases the chances that a wrongly-convicted person will be set free. Innocent people convicted of lesser crimes are more likely to stay convicted.
Almost all the exonerations were in murder and rape cases, and that implies, according to the study, that many innocent people have been convicted of less serious crimes.
Indeed, the study says, "if we reviewed prison sentences with the same level of care that we devote to death sentences, there would have been over 28,500 non-death-row exonerations in the past 15 years rather than the 255 that have in fact occurred."Prosecutors, of course, scoffed at the study. One even said that
many of the people exonerated under the study's definition may nonetheless have committed the crimes in question, though the evidence may have become too weak to prove that beyond a reasonably doubt.That is, "I don't care if you've been exonerated. You're still guilty." To that all-too-common attitude among police and prosecutors, who just know who is guilty and who isn't and wonder why we have to bother with all this stupid proving things, that same prosecutor added a second scummy opinion: The error rate projected by the study was acceptable. But lead researcher Samuel Gross of the University of Michigan fired back.
"No rate of preventable errors that destroy people's lives and destroy the lives of those close to them is acceptable," he said.Amen to that.
Footnote: A telling statistic about the state of our nation is that rapes of white women by black men account for less than 10% of rapes. But black men falsely accused of raping white women made up half of those exonerated in rape cases.
Apparently they do all look alike.
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