| May 13, 2005 Law And Disorder by Kevin Morford, insurgent49  Television programs such as CSI and Law and Order depict police and prosecutors as forensic geniuses who go beyond the obvious to dig the truth out from its hiding hole. The public safety is served by hardworking and brilliant law enforcement professionals who go the extra mile to make sure that they solve every crime, but who only charge and convict the guilty ... if you believe what you see on television, that is. While some police and prosecutors are devoted to the truth and the proper performance of their jobs, the truth is far more sordid than what you see on cop shows. In the real world, crime labs falsify test results, cops lie under oath and frame suspects, and innocent people are charged, convicted, and sentenced to prison or even death. All of these things have been reported in the media. On the front page of the May 7, 2005 Anchorage Daily News, a Virginia crime lab was reported to have falsely produced incriminating DNA test results in two separate tests in the same capital murder case. The article reports that reviews of crime lab work in several other states including Texas and Oklahoma are currently taking place. In the mid 1990s, Frederic Whitehurst, a senior chemist at the FBI, publicly alleged shoddy work, tainted evidence, and skewed testimony coming from the main FBI crime lab. His allegations were subsequently confirmed, and the Justice Department identified thousands of criminal convictions that needed to be reviewed so that the falsely convicted could be set free. In September of 2000, the city of Los Angeles agreed to accept federal oversight of its police department because of a long history of serious misconduct regarding suspects. Several police officers were convicted of framing suspects and planting evidence, and hundreds of former convictions had to be re-examined to see which of them needed to be overturned. Los Angeles is not the only city with serious problems of police corruption. It is an open secret among those involved in the criminal justice system that many cops routinely lie on the stand in order to bolster the case against a suspect. Those lies are often based upon a sincere belief that the suspect is guilty, but those sincere beliefs are not always accurate. In Illinois in 2000, Republican Governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on imposition of the death penalty after it was revealed that over half of the death penalty convictions in that state had been reversed because the wrong person had been convicted. Capital murder cases are the most important types of cases that law enforcement deals with but, in some states, people have been convicted after a trial lasting just one day. The fact that an innocent person was sentenced to death in more than half of the capital murder cases in Illinois reveals a grave lack of diligence and professionalism on the part of the police and attorneys involved in those cases. Nationwide, at least 119 people sentenced to death since 1973 have been released based upon subsequent evidence of their actual innocence, almost always after spending many years on death row. The exculpatory evidence in these cases was often uncovered by investigative journalists, law students, or family members rather than by the police or prosecutors. We are left to wonder how many false convictions are obtained and never reversed in non-capital cases, which tend to receive less scrutiny and review. Television programs such as CSI and Law and Order present a false picture of what really happens in the criminal justice system. While the Bush administration has increased funding to law enforcement, it has not made that funding contingent upon an improvement in the professionalism or diligence of the agencies being funded, and has not funded commensurate increases in funding of public defenders. Under our adversarial system of justice, a competent and motivated defense attorney is often the only effective protection available against an improper prosecution. Unfortunately, the Bush administration has actively sought to deprive many suspects of their right to counsel, by holding them incommunicado, by rendering them to other countries, by designating them as enemy combatants, by inadequate funding and by other methods. The result is that prosecutorial errors and abuses cannot be effectively challenged in many cases, and innocent people are punished. Perfection is not possible in criminal prosecutions, but we can and should demand that criminal justice professionals not lie, falsify evidence, or frame people. We can and should insist that the government provide adequate funding for the defense of those who can’t afford their own attorney. We can and should demand more devotion to finding the truth than our police and prosecutors have been demonstrating. We should not let ourselves be taken in by the deceptive portrayal that is presented in fictional television programming. Kevin Morford is a political activist and an attorney in private practice in the Anchorage area. He can be reached at kmorford@insurgent49.com. |
-
Columnists -
|
||||||
| Copyright
2005
Insurgent Media. All Rights
Reserved. in-sur-gent (in sur'jent), n. 1. a member of a group which revolts against the policies of its leadership. |
|||||||
