"Nice to see the system works"
Why do you make a comment like that in reference to these 5 articles? The expose by the Chicago Tribune was making the point that the system is permeated with crooks who treat human lives like just so much fodder for their own career bellies, and whom--even when caught-- often get moved into higher positions of "trust" and "service" rather than being punished. The point repeatedly made is that the system is NOT reliable and suffers from both corruption and human error...as all human systems always have and always will. Keeping the death penalty in the midst of such corruption is like allowing little children to carry loaded pistols around.
THe articles made these kinds of points:
"Since a 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling designed to curb misconduct by prosecutors, at least 381 defendants nationally have had a homicide conviction thrown out because prosecutors concealed evidence suggesting innocence or presented evidence they knew to be false"
"The failure of prosecutors to obey the demands of justice--and the legal system's failure to hold them accountable for it--leads to wrongful convictions, and retrials and appeals that cost taxpayers millions of dollars. It also fosters a corrosive distrust in a branch of government that America holds up as a standard to the world."
"But the kind of deliberate misconduct that contributed to those 381 defendants' homicide convictions is so grave that courts believe it should never occur. And although prosecutors often downplay individual cases involving such deceit as aberrations, the body of cases turned up by the Tribune's search reveals that it happens frequently and in nearly limitless ways."
"Prosecutors have concealed evidence that discredited their star witnesses, pointed to other suspects or supported a defendant's claim of self-defence. They have suppressed evidence that a murder occurred when the defendants had alibis, or that it occurred not in a defendant's home, as alleged, but in someone else's cornfield far away. In one case prosecutors depicted red paint as blood. In another they portrayed hog blood as human."
"But in the hundreds of cases found by the Tribune, prosecutors went in the other direction from Cummings and Falconer, showing a disrespect for the law that is typically associated with criminals, not the men and women who prosecute them."
"Bennett Gershman, a law professor at Pace University in White Plains, N.Y., has written extensively about misconduct by prosecutors and calls it a "serious cancer in our system of justice.""
""There is no check on prosecutorial misconduct except for the prosecutor's own attitudes and beliefs and inner morality," he said."
Or as a one-time employee of the DA refers to the prosecutors: "those lying, cheating bastards."! |
