Why We Need Good Defense Lawyers
MSNBC (I'm too lazy to post the link) is reporting a story where a man who has spent the last 24 years in prison for a rape charge is being released based on new DNA evidence.
25 years.
A woman mistakenly fingered him as the rapist and the state took over two decades of his life away.
I suggest to you that it is indeed better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent man to go to jail. Imagine, for a moment, the horror of sitting in a cell for a crime you didn't commit. Your children growing up- he had two- and your mother dying while bars kept you from the outside world.
Based on what we now know to be the facts of the case (the DNA as we now know it is indisputable) it is clear that a decent attorney could have taken what would have to have been a circumstantial case and poked holes all through it. Our criminal court system requires a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt because the punishment for breaking a serious crime is so great- imprisonment.
My guess is this- (a) he was given a public defender, who are overworked and less experienced than their private counterparts, (b) the jury probably decided the case in about fifteen minutes, and (c) either no appeal was filed or one was thrown together at the last minute.
The Georgia Legislature will probably compensate him for the imprisonment. A few years ago, they authorized a payment of one million dollars to a man who had been imprisoned for 18 years.
One million dollars for eighteen years of your life gone.
Seems like quite a paltry sum, doesn't it?
25 years.
A woman mistakenly fingered him as the rapist and the state took over two decades of his life away.
I suggest to you that it is indeed better for ten guilty men to go free than one innocent man to go to jail. Imagine, for a moment, the horror of sitting in a cell for a crime you didn't commit. Your children growing up- he had two- and your mother dying while bars kept you from the outside world.
Based on what we now know to be the facts of the case (the DNA as we now know it is indisputable) it is clear that a decent attorney could have taken what would have to have been a circumstantial case and poked holes all through it. Our criminal court system requires a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt because the punishment for breaking a serious crime is so great- imprisonment.
My guess is this- (a) he was given a public defender, who are overworked and less experienced than their private counterparts, (b) the jury probably decided the case in about fifteen minutes, and (c) either no appeal was filed or one was thrown together at the last minute.
The Georgia Legislature will probably compensate him for the imprisonment. A few years ago, they authorized a payment of one million dollars to a man who had been imprisoned for 18 years.
One million dollars for eighteen years of your life gone.
Seems like quite a paltry sum, doesn't it?
posted by Yorick at 7:49 PM
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