Sunday, April 13, 2014

Examine Judicial Failures!

Don't Let the Prosecutor Off the Hook�|�Bennett L. Gershman:

Jonathan Fleming is the 1,350th person officially exonerated in the U.S. since 1989, when the National Registry of Exonerations began to record wrongful convictions. He spent nearly 25 years in jail for a murder he didn't commit. He had a powerful alibi that the prosecutor didn't believe. And he was represented by an attorney who was no match for the prosecutor. The media's report of Mr. Fleming's ordeal, and exoneration, is similar to the hundreds of other reported exonerations -- dry, clinical, and not overly curious about how it happened. It appears from the reports that Fleming was a victim of a tragic mistake, and a series of blunders by law enforcement that caused an innocent man to spend half of his life in prison. But nobody, certainly nobody in the media, has attempted to examine this case more closely and to ask probing questions about how this human tragedy could have happened? Indeed, almost never do commentators, reporters, or the U.S. justice system itself ask this question. There is hardly ever a postmortem of a derailment in the criminal justice system, as there typically is when a train derails, or a plane crashes....
Couldn't agree more with this post.

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