Imagine for a moment that you, yes you, are finishing school tomorrow. Imagine further that after the dean hands you your shiny new degree and you land a cherry job working in an office in a big fancy hotel. You do a great job and after a year you are made assistant manager of the sales department. The next day, your life is ruined.
Someone who is staying in your hotel is raped. In the trauma and confusion that follows, the victim identifies you as the culprit, although she’s only 75 percent sure.
You are hauled off to jail before family and friends. You lose your job. You lose your friends. The public instantly recognizes you as “that rapist.”
You sit in jail for 10 months. As if that’s not insulting enough, you are put on trial before a “jury of your peers,” if there is such a thing, and you are convicted of the crime based upon the sketchy identification of the victim and the testimony of one cop.
That cop, at your trial, says that fiber samples found at the crime scene matched your clothing exactly. You are about to be sentenced, and your lawyer tells you that if you confess the judge will go easier on you.
You tell your mouthpiece and the judge to piss off, that you didn’t do it, and that you will not admit to something you did not do even if it might help you out. You get the maximum sentence of 30 years in jail.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
Now imagine that for 15 years you sit in a jail cell, abused by other prisoners physically and psychologically.
You could reduce your burden by admitting to the crime — parole boards love that stuff. Psychologists think a confession shows that you are being rehabilitated by accepting responsibility.
Still, you refuse to admit anything, claiming that you are innocent. To the powers that be it means that you are still deluded and dangerous.
Then one day a new scientific test comes along which proves a few new things. It proves conclusively that the fibers from the crime scene did not come from your clothes.
It proves that you did not commit the crime. It proves that someone else committed the rape. It proves that the cop who testified against you was lying. It proves that the degree of certainty he really could have had as to the identity of the perpetrator of the rape was grossly overstated.
What would you do? How would you feel? This is not an academic exercise. This is reality — and this happens far too often in our country. Sometimes it happens because one incompetent, unethical cop or lab technician lets his or her ego get in the way of the truth.
Such was the case in Oklahoma with Joyce Gilchrist. She was a “police investigator” who sent many innocent people to jail based upon testimony which was not founded upon truth.
The example of the hotel clerk is based upon a case in which this officer swore under oath that a man raped a woman based upon hair recovered from the crime scene.
Fifteen years later DNA testing cleared the man.
It also happens in other ways, like in Alaska, where a black man was wrongly sent to prison. In that case, a member of a jury threatened another member of the same jury with bodily harm if she continued to vote to acquit the man.
She thought he was innocent, but gave in when she felt her health and life were in danger.
And then there are the cases you hear about on CNN. You know what I’m talking about. A man was on death row, awaiting execution for murder, new DNA evidence clears him of any wrongdoing just weeks before Texas or some other state puts the needle to him.
How can this be?
How can a jury of twelve people, people like you and I, send someone to the death chamber when he or she didn’t do it?
How can we look ourselves in the mirror knowing that the criminal justice system has rules saying that just because a person may be innocent, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are entitled to be set free?
The reason I ask you to consider this is simple.
In your lifetime you will probably serve on a jury, and you will have to make these sorts of life and death judgements.
None of the people who were wrongly convicted ever thought it could happen to them, in this country, in this day and age.
If it’s your neck on the chopping block, which it could very well be, you’d better pray to whatever god you worship that someone on your jury cares enough to have thought this over.
Questions? Comments? Outraged denunciations? Write to Brad at physhead@hotmail.com.
