From: Hermit (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Sat Jul 27 2002 - 18:35:24 MDT
[Hermit 1] Based on discussions with senior officers and judiciary, and assuming the prevalence is similar to more conventional "salting" practice, perhaps in 40% to 60% of criminal cases...
[Hermit 1] Certainly not miniscule by my reading, but better than in the case of
testimony purchased in return for plea-bargains or remissions.
[Joe Dees 2] I consider your estimate to be quite high. Are you saying that roughly half the inmates convicted of violent crimes are innocent?
[Hermit 3] Not at all. Most of them are, in the opinion of the officers involved, really nasty pieces of work who absolutely deserve what they get. Quite frequently, society would agree that the officers are probably correct.
[Hermit 3] Unfortunately for the officers, the rules don't work that way. Unfortunately for some accused, the officers are usually quite competent to redress this perceived unfairness. The justice system appears to be heading that way too. e.g. Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached" ["Justice" Scalia]
[Hermit 3] All I was suggesting is that not infrequently, the accused is quite possibly not guilty of the specific crime which gets them put away. Percentage wise, I'd hate to hazard a guess. This is not a subject that is discussed much publically by anyone involved in it.
[Hermit 3] What is being discussed, with ever greater frequency, is the extraordinary number of innocent people who have been executed.[quote]The ruling by a federal judge in New York (see below) that the death penalty is unconstitutional received wide national coverage and support. In his decision Judge Jed Rakoff noted: "In brief, the Court found that the best available evidence indicates that, on the one hand, innocent people are sentenced to death with materially greater frequency than was previously supposed and that, on the other hand, convincing proof of their innocence often does not emerge until long after their convictions. It is therefore fully foreseeable that in enforcing the death penalty, a meaningful number of innocent people will be executed who otherwise would eventually be able to prove their innocence." To draw his conclusions, Rakoff used information compiled by a number of national researchers and experts, including the Death Penalty Information Center's innocence data. In his decision,
he noted that DPIC's innocence list is based on "reasonably strict and objective standards in listing and describing the data and summaries that appear on its website." Read the ruling (http://www.nysd.uscourts.gov/rulings/quinones.pdf). See also, Innocence (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innoc.html) and DPIC's Press Release (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/PR-DPICRakoff.pdf).
[Hermit 3] Given that cases awarded the DP tend to draw a great deal more investigations than those who do not, and given that according to the DPIC (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innoc.html), 101 people in 24 states have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence since 1973, what percentage of much less scrutinized cases do you think were rigged*?
Regards
Hermit
*rigged as in, "You can't win, you can't break-even, but it's the only game in town!"
---- This message was posted by Hermit to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25812>
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