Tapsearch Com EditorIs the judicial system too prosecution-friendly?
April 25th 2007 22:38
This Radley Balko piece is interesting, jumping off from the Duke lacrosse scandal to make the claim that many innocent people are behind bars. To be sure, DNA evidence is freeing some people, and that's great.
But I really have to take issue with the notion that prosecutors run rampant, imprisoning the innocent at will. Balko relies on anecdotes rather than statistics; there have been millions of prosecutions over the last few decades, so no number of individual cases can really show a trend.
In fact, the system is set up so that guilty people go free (the reasonable doubt standard), and if the cops screw up, judges throw away good evidence and (often) let criminals walk (the exclusionary rule). In theory, the latter is to punish the cops, but it punishes future victims more.
If you want to say certain reforms could help the innocent, fine. Better DNA collection is one of those. But the notion that, on the whole, the innocent face a harder time than the guilty, is almost certainly false. I would like to see some real statistics on the percentage of inmates eventually cleared, though.
One other thing to bear in mind is that there's a certain continuum between easy to punish the innocent and hard to punish even the guilty. (Though I should note that DNA frees the innocent and fingers the guilty.) With some policies, you could let 20 guilty people go to save 1 innocent, which is hard to justify.
By Robert VerBruggen
But I really have to take issue with the notion that prosecutors run rampant, imprisoning the innocent at will. Balko relies on anecdotes rather than statistics; there have been millions of prosecutions over the last few decades, so no number of individual cases can really show a trend.
In fact, the system is set up so that guilty people go free (the reasonable doubt standard), and if the cops screw up, judges throw away good evidence and (often) let criminals walk (the exclusionary rule). In theory, the latter is to punish the cops, but it punishes future victims more.
If you want to say certain reforms could help the innocent, fine. Better DNA collection is one of those. But the notion that, on the whole, the innocent face a harder time than the guilty, is almost certainly false. I would like to see some real statistics on the percentage of inmates eventually cleared, though.
One other thing to bear in mind is that there's a certain continuum between easy to punish the innocent and hard to punish even the guilty. (Though I should note that DNA frees the innocent and fingers the guilty.) With some policies, you could let 20 guilty people go to save 1 innocent, which is hard to justify.
By Robert VerBruggen
| 42 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
subscribe to this blog
