innocence has no meaning in the  'justice' system 3/20/2016 0 Comments   by E.L. Christianson Jr. Justice has no meaning in the justice system.  The system works according to the law.  Whether the law is fair or just has no particular bearing on the outcomes.  A quote from deceased supreme court judge Scalia offers insight into our entire concept of justice: "Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached." And that is it.  Innocence doesn't count for anything in the system we call the criminal justice system, where in truth it is the system itself that is criminal.  And, if one is waiting for 'justice' in the United States of America, it is a long wait... a very long wait, indeed. If you are poor, you will almost never go to trial—instead you will be forced to accept a plea deal offered by government prosecutors. If you are poor, the word of the police, who are not averse to fabricating or tampering with evidence, manipulating witnesses and planting guns or drugs, will be accepted in a courtroom as if it was the word of God. If you are poor, and especially if you are of color, almost anyone who can verify your innocence will have a police record of some kind and thereby will be invalidated as a witness. If you are poor, you will be railroaded in assembly-line production from a town or city where there are no jobs through the police stations, county jails and courts directly into prison. And if you are poor, because you don’t have money for adequate legal defense, you will serve sentences that are decades longer than those for equivalent crimes anywhere else in the industrialized world. If you are a poor person of color in America you understand this with a visceral fear. You have no chance. Being poor has become a crime. And this makes mass incarceration the most pressing civil rights issue of our era. Once you are charged in America, whether you did the crime or not, you are almost always found guilty.  The “Reid technique” that investigators are taught to elicit confessions from people, and how it can often get false ones. Read this piece on how that happens. Excerpt: Of the three hundred and eleven people exonerated through post-conviction DNA testing, more than a quarter had given false confessions—including those convicted in such notorious cases as the Central Park Five. The extent of the problem is unknowable, because there’s no national database on wrongful convictions. But false confessions, which often lead to these convictions, are not rare, and experts say that Reid-style interrogations can produce them. ​There have been 337 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States. The first DNA exoneration took place in 1989. Exonerations have been won in 37 states; since 2000, there have been 263 exonerations.    20 of the 336 people exonerated through DNA served time on death row. Another 16 were charged with capital crimes but not sentenced to death.   The average length of time served by exonerees is 14 years. Arrestees are placed on a waiting list for representation before the court. The people of Louisiana who are made to wait in line are those most at risk in our 'criminal' justice system: usually poor, often a person of color, and facing severe sentences. Yet, these are the people who most need the public defender’s help investigating the state’s case against them and quickly uncovering favorable evidence before it is lost. This is why the ACLU and the ACLU of Louisiana yesterday filed a class-action lawsuit against the New Orleans public defender’s office as well as the Louisiana Public Defender Board for failing to abide by defendants’ Sixth Amendment right to legal representation. Guantánamo, offers a stark contrast to how we deal with people believed to have engaged in activities perceived, if not proved, to be against the best interests of the United States. It would not occur to us to summarily execute them as Saudi Arabia did the unfortunate 47. Instead we permit them to live happily ever after in facilities furnished by the U.S. Government without charging them (a) for room and board or (b) with any acts of misconduct. As of the first of the year the United States has magnanimously spent, without hope of reimbursement, $5.2 billion in order to enable the people at Guantánamo to reside there. Many of the residents of Guantánamo continue to live there even though they have been cleared for release. As of this writing there are men in confinement, 44 of whom have been cleared for release. Fifty-two of the men confined have never been charged with any crimes and some of them have been in residence since 2002. They have been given the cutesy names of “forever prisoners” since they have no prospect of being charged with any criminal conduct nor of ever being released. Being one of the “forever prisoners” at Guantánamo is, of course, better than being one of the 47 former prisoners in Saudi Arabia because a “forever prisoner” is still alive whereas the former prisoners are all dead. ​Some of the “forever prisoners” may not, however, continue to enjoy the benefits of this distinction. One of them is Tariq Ba Odah, a Yemini prisoner. He has been cleared for release for 7 years but is still imprisoned. He has been on a hunger strike for 9 years and is now severely malnourished. He is at death’s, but not the prison’s, door. That is because a country that has tentatively agreed to accept him wants to review his medical records before doing so. The Pentagon has reportedly been slow to hand them over on the grounds that it is protecting Mr. Odah’s right to privacy. The Pentagon places the right to privacy above the right to life and liberty. Mr. Odah probably doesn’t get the difference. He probably never will. That is because he may be dead before it is explained to him. Other “forever prisoners” may also find it hard to understand why they are better off in Guantánamo than dead.  How can we reduce the enormous populations of our country's local jails?   Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York unveiled a plan to decrease the population of the Rikers Island jail complex by reducing the backlog of cases in state courts. About 85 percent of those at Rikers haven't been convicted of any offense; they're just awaiting trial, sometimes for as long as hundreds of days. Mayor de Blasio's plan is a positive step. Yet it ignores a deeper question: Why are so many people - particularly poor people of color - in jail awaiting trial in the first place? Usually, it is because they cannot afford bail. According to a 2011 report by the city's Independent Budget Office, 79 percent of pretrial detainees were sent to Rikers because they couldn't post bail right away. This is a national problem. Across the United States, most of the people incarcerated in local jails have not been convicted of a crime but are awaiting trial. And most of those are waiting in jail not because of any specific risk they have been deemed to pose, but because they can't pay their bail. In other words, we are locking people up for being poor. This is unjust. We should abolish monetary bail outright. Some will argue that bail is necessary to prevent flight before trial, but there is no good basis for that assumption. For one thing, people considered to pose an unacceptable risk of flight (or violence) are not granted bail in the first place. (Though the procedures for determining who poses a risk themselves ought to be viewed with skepticism, especially since conceptions of risk are often shaped, tacitly or otherwise, by racist assumptions.) There is also evidence that bail is not necessary to ensure that people show up for trial. In Washington, DC, a city that makes virtually no use of monetary bail, the vast majority of arrestees who are released pretrial do return to court, and rates of additional crime before trial are low. In addition to being unjust and unnecessary, pretrial incarceration can have harmful consequences. Not only do those who are in jail before trial suffer the trauma of confinement, but in comparison with their bailed-out counterparts, they are also more likely to be convicted at trial. As documented in a 2010 Human Rights Watch report, the legal system is substantially tougher to navigate from behind bars. People in jail face more pressure to accept plea bargains - often, ones that aren't to their advantage - than do those confronting their charges from home. Those who spend even a few days in jail can lose their jobs or housing during that time. Single parents can lose custody of their children. By exacerbating the effects of poverty, and by placing people in often traumatizing circumstances, pretrial incarceration may actually lead to more crime. Bail also raises issues of racial injustice. A number of studies have shown that black defendants are assigned higher bail amounts than their white counterparts. This discrepancy is compounded by the fact that black people disproportionately live in poverty and thus unduly face challenges in paying bail. Other burdens of bail also fall harder on people of color. For instance, black mothers face a particularly serious risk of losing custody of their children while incarcerated, because they are excessively targeted by child protective services. Jails disproportionately confine mentally ill people, too - rates of mental illness are four to six times higher in jail than outside - and people with mental health problems often live in economic circumstances that make it difficult to afford bail. A study released in February by the Vera Institute of Justice found that one-third of jailed people with mental illness were unemployed before being arrested. Finally, monetary bail is at odds with the legal ideal of the presumption of innocence. If we want to grant people this presumption, we must not punish them before their trials. There is no getting around it: We are incarcerating people for being poor, at great cost to actual human lives. We have to stop.