Why do the innocent get convicted. Most politicians and pundits have blamed the prosecuting attorneys. But the justice system in America is too complicated and convoluted for the blame for any wrongs to be laid at the feet of a single group of people. When the justice system gets it right, it is very right. I know there are people who ought to be incarcerated for the rest of their lives because they are a continuing threat to the peace and safety of the community. Many of them actually do get a life sentence. But there are a vast number of people, perhaps one in ten among those in America’s many prisons, who are not guilty of any felony at all.
When we “get tough on crime” it makes no sense to waist resources on locking up innocent people. Whenever an innocent person is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, the actual perpetrator gets a free ride to go forth and offend the law again and again. This isn’t “tough on crime.” It enables those criminals who continue to prey upon society while laughing up their sleeves at the system for locking up someone who didn’t do it.
So how does it happen? It all begins with the police officers and detectives who investigate crimes and arrest an innocent person instead of hunting down the guilty one. There is an unhealthy attitude among many police that they are standing against a whole world of criminals. To these cops, everyone is guilty of something and ought to be arrested. They think only police officers and investigators are righteous and can do no wrong. That is why they’re willing to excuse obviously egregious actions by their fellows.
I’m not saying all law enforcement officers are like this. On the contrary most LEOs are conscientious and ethical in carrying out their duties. But all LEOs either actively defend the ones who do wrong, or remain silent when they ought to condemn the misdeeds of their fellows. This is the primary reason for public distrust of police. That helps feed the police perception that they’re alone against a world of criminals.
But the biggest problem with police arresting the innocent is the way they are trained to investigate a crime. I call it the “Hollywood method” of investigation. We have all seen the movies and police procedural shows in which the veteran cop tells his rookie partner to “go with your gut” when deciding on whom to arrest for a crime. Looking at the stereotypical police diet of bad coffee and stale doughnuts, I don’t wonder that they have a bad feeling in their guts whenever they come in contact with Joe citizen. But jokes aside, the pressures to close a case now no matter what, and the attitude of “us against them” are drivers that tempt an investigator to reject empirical facts for gut feelings. When they do this they often have to fill in the blanks in their case with fictions and fudgings to get a case before a prosecutor that she will run with.
Training won’t be enough so long as the culture and friction remain. But investigators that follow hunches at the expense of facts are far too common to be comfortable with. We must demand that our investigators only follow the facts, all the facts, and nothing but the facts, no matter whether the case is closed or not. There is far more cooperation between local police forces than in the past. But the sharing of information between agencies is still far behind what is necessary to keep the community safe from predators.
The case of the murder of Christine Morton is one example of the problem. Investigators decided upon meeting her husband, that Michael Morton was the one who killed his wife in a rage over sexual frustration. Morton did not confess, and there was not enough evidence to convince a jury that Morton did the crime. There was evidence that a third party intruder unknown to the Mortons had entered the home and killed Christine. But it didn’t fit the scenario developed by the gut feelings of the investigators, and was discounted and even covered up. Then a criminal was given a deal to reduce his sentence of he would tell the jury that Morton told him he killed his own wife.
With the testimony of the snitch and the lack of evidence contrary, which was ignored or covered up by the police, Morton was convicted and did nearly two decades in prison for a crime of which he was actually a victim. A capital crime, one in which the State of Texas would seek the death penalty, was committed by the murderer, but the state could not charge Morton with capital murder because he could not burglarize his own home, only a third party could.
The man who killed Christine Morton had just recently killed another woman who looked a lot like her nearby. After Morton was in prison this man was finally arrested for a murder he committed of yet another woman who looked a lot like Christine Morton. He was known to police and had been angry at his own wife, who just happened to resemble Mrs. Morton, and took it out on his many victims as surrogates. The question we should ask is how many women would be alive today had the police followed the facts instead of their guts.
But once the arrest is made and the evidence, both real and fiction, handed over to the District attorney, the case gets even worse. No DA is ever interested in finding evidence that the person the police have charged is not the one who did the crime. Instead, as in the Morton case, DAs will hide evidence and refuse to investigate any possibility of the wrong person being charged. DAs in America are elected officials who uniformly campain on their record of convictions, Not their record of properly vetted cases. They don’t want to be seen as soft on crime for letting people go on little technicalities like they didn’t do it. In the Morton case all of these factors came into play when evidence accidentally collected by the police before they had decided Morton would go down for the crime was hidden from the defense attorney to ensure the jury never saw it. Then the DA intentionally used perjury, known to be such beforehand, to convince the jury that Morton was guilty of something he knew Morton did not do.
The families of victims are often recruited by police and DAs to support the conviction of an innocent person by feeding an attitude of hate toward that person. Once this emotional investment is made, most people are unwilling to change their minds even in the face of irrefutable evidence. It’s far too common to hear sound bites on television of victims’ family members venting hate toward the one they’ve become convinced did their loved one wrong. Even after exoneration of one who is actually innocent, these people remain estranged and hateful. The damage to their souls is too great to heal with truth.
How can we fix these problems? Denial of their existence won’t fix them. We must first recognize what the problems and bad practices are before we can work out solutions. The United States has a higher percentage of our population incarcerated than any other civilized, developed democracy in the world. We have too much vengeance and not enough justice in our system. I will propose solutions in tomorrow’s post.
