Charles Kuffner reports on an “Innocence Summit” in Texas last week, and points to two more reports from Grits for Breakfast that provide more colorful detail. The news story already says most of what needs saying, though:
AUSTIN — Nine wrongfully convicted men who spent a collective 148 years in Texas prisons met with a select group of prosecutors, judges and police chiefs in the Senate chamber Thursday to urge the state to establish a commission to investigate claims of innocence.
“I’m crying out for mercy today for someone who may still be in prison,” said James Curtis Giles, who served 10 years in prison for rape before DNA testing proved him innocent.
[…]DNA testing in recent years has cleared 33 men of charges related to rape, kidnapping and murder.
It’s conceivable that, given a perfect and infallible court system, there might be an interesting discussion to be had about the ethics of capital punishment. With the court system we have, particularly in the state that is most gleeful about executing people, it’s just not a conversation worth having.
The second Grits for Breakfast post also adds some really good material, which I’ll quote below the fold in case you have some good reason for not going over there:
Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire had several poignant comments and questions that are worth recording. For starters, he declared (with Chief Harold Hurtt in the audience) that he thinks Houston PD should not operate its own crime lab, that forensic science work should be done by an independent body who think of themselves as scientists first instead of police. Good point! Regular readers know I’m not a great believer in the supposed neutrality of most forensic science.
Whitmire told the public officials in the room that “You need to read your mail,” implying (accurately) that many elected officials pay little attention to jail mail and don’t take letters from prisoners seriously. That mentality has contributed to wrongful convictions by sweeping legitimate voices under the rug, he said.
He also emphasized that any legislator who wants to be “tuff on crime” should also be tough on wrongful convictions, because that meant the guilty person went free. Whitmire criticized the Houston crime lab for ending its investigation into possible wrongful convictions before the lead investigator, Michael Bromwich, thought he was finished.
An audience member from Houston protested that they only ended the investigation after the city spent $6 million dollars on it, but Whitmire shot back that they hadn’t gone through all the cases, and the Harris DA had $20 million sitting in its asset forfeiture fund that Chuck Rosenthal could have used to finish the job. No rebuttal was offered amidst the awkward silence that followed that declaration!
As Chuck says in his post, “Ensuring that the guilty are convicted and the innocent are not is not and should not be a partisan issue.” The justice system we have in many parts of this country is a complete travesty, and we need less grand-standing about crime, and more real efforts to fix what’s broken.
I have no problem with the abstract notion of a death penalty; some people probably should die. But the justice system is not a precise instrument; it makes errors for a variety of reasons, even under the best of circumstances. I understand that we have a desire for vengeance, but justice requires calm deliberation.
And for those who really don’t care too much about the wrongfully condemned, I would like to point out that the cost of a capital trial, with all the subsequent appeals, far exceeds the cost of simply locking someone up for the remainder of their life.
Perhaps I should point out that my view is not purely abstract – I have sat on two juries in murder cases. From that vantage point, I can say that this is an ugly process.
I don’t support the death penalty for the simple reason that most people who get sentenced to death were in a contest of them and their underfunded public defender vs. the vast resources of the state. Give me enough time and resources, and I’m sure I can find a murder case somewhere that I can convince twelve people that you, Chad, are guilty of.
But W told us that Texas had never executed an innocent man. With assurances like that, why would we need to look into old cases?
While I agree that our current system is a serious mess, I’m not quite sure why these arguments would affect the death penalty differently than other penalties. The death penalty is irrevocable; but so is a prison sentence that never gets reexamined. I suspect, in fact, that capital punishment cases, by virtue of the greater scrutiny they tend to evoke, probably have better process than do similar cases that receive life or other long sentences.
The problem of unjust death penalties may differ in degree from that of lesser punishments; but not in kind. I’m not sure whether or not the death penalty is, in all, a good idea; but pretending that we can make the system more just by abolishing the death penalty, rather than by cleaning up the process, is fooling ourselves.
In that vein, the fact that every false conviction means a criminal going free, as well as an innocent person being punished, needs to be reiterated more often. People need to remember that, even if they don’t give a toss about the rights of the innocent, a system that results in false convictions is not a system that is tough on crime.
It was once felt that it was not sufficient that justice be done, but that justice must also been seen to be done. Then some bright spark realised that as long as justice is seen to be done, it doesn’t really matter that much whether it actually is done or not…
The US has 3 million prisoners. Nine folks were “improperly” incarcerated? That many soldiers have been electrocuted in Iraq barracks’ showers from improper wiring by a Halliburton subcontractor. Do you really believe the Texas prisoners didn’t belong imprisoned (if for other reasons)?
Fair trial, prudent appeal, then timely execution. It isn’t about personal remediation or a warning to dissuade others. It is about zero recidivism and economic deployment of resources. It is about absence of personal responsiblity and exercised civic virtue in protective counterpoint.
Don’t hold the US criminal system to higher standards than a Housing Association. It is about Milgram and Zimbardo, about abuse of power and impressed terror. Central management is a stomach – it knows it’s hungry, it has no brain, and its waste products are handled by others.
First, thanks for the link love, Professor.
And to Uncle Al, that was just nine prisoners on the dais at this one event. Since the turn of the century Texas has seen 33 DNA exonerations, and another 75 or so in drug war cases, plus a few other non-DNA exonerations here and there. On Grits recently I had discussions here and here of methodologies used to estimate the total number of innocents incarcerated. A commenter put the statistics in a frame of reference I science-oriented crowd should readily understand:
“In fact it seems to be justice of less than three sigmas (~2.37 sigma). Industry currently tries for 6 sigma in their efforts but the courts can’t do even 3 when a life is on the line. What does that say about the American justice system? Three sigma would yield less than 27 reversals per 10K sentences, four less than 64 per 100K, five less than 5 per 10M, and six less than 2 per billion. While the rest of us have been producing higher quality goods our court system has been producing inferior justice. It time we tried for six sigma in our justice system.”
I bet that the “jail mail” that public officials recieve is about as useful reading as the “green ink mail” that physicists receive from amateurs.
Some have suggested that instead of long prison terms in lieu of execution, we cripple violent criminals in ways that would make it harder for them to commit violent crimes again. Since hand use is tied to productivity now, perhaps crippling legs so they have to shuffle around, and a few writers suggested blinding them (I forget who, it was in Omni magazine in the 80s). Well, that’s weird, but with all the exposure of false conviction, execution is unsettling even for those of us who weren’t opposed to it in principle.
BTW Carl, I’d like to see a collection of the “green ink” mail that turned out to have useful or clever ideas about physics. I’m willing to bet there was some of it in there, and haven’t some amateurs or semi-amateurs done some important things lately? – heh – for example, you said of yourself: “If you’re interested in what I do, I’m an amateur working in elementary particles. My regular job involves stuff like driving forklifts and filling out environmental forms for Liquafaction Corporation’s ethanol plant.” I see that physicists have to reference your web page, that is great. But you still don’t have a bio in Wikipedia! Want me to write one up? LMK if you are interested, and someday maybe you can return the favor if you think I deserve it.
Carl, the problem with making that assumption is that some of these wrongfully convicted men wrote a LOT of letters asking for help and didn’t get it.
Also, for public officials running prisons and jails (Sen. Whitmire chairs the Senate Criminal Justice Committee, e.g.,), they have a managerial and a fiduciary responsibility to pay attention to allegations of abuse, poor conditions, etc. There are no consequences if a physicist ignores unsolicited opinions. However, when the state does so in the face of pleas by innocent people who’ve been wrongly convicted, that dismissive attitude takes on more serious public policy implications.
I’ll bet companies that aspire to six sigma performance don’t ignore feedback from people within the system. With less than three sigma justice, though, it seems irresponsible to assume folks in jail have nothing useful to tell us.
This is the part I’ve never understood. How do two or three trials rack up a higher bill than a lifetime of jail? Granted, lawyers and judges cost a heck of a lot more than prison guards, but still… And a capital case is a Big Deal. You’d think the prosecution and defence would be careful and experienced enough to avoid the kind of brainos that enable successful appeals.
Kate, comment?