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On the other hand, it was convenient

Submitted by Prometheus 6 on May 22, 2006 - 9:05am.
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[TS] Justice Derailed
By BOB HERBERT

Under the headline "Slay Confession Is Full of Holes," Jim Dwyer, who is now at The Times but was then at The Daily News, wrote:

"[Warney's] confession is contradicted by virtually all the physical evidence made public, including a trail of blood apparently left by the killer, but which did not come from Warney."

I wondered then, and I still wonder, why so many seemingly decent people in law enforcement are willing to participate in the evil practice of sending people to prison — or, worse — who are demonstrably innocent of the charges against them.

The prosecutors who went after Douglas Warney were seeking the death penalty. It didn't matter to them:

That Mr. Warney was delusional.

That Mr. Warney said that he had killed Mr. Beason in a struggle in the kitchen, when in fact the victim had been murdered in his bed.

That Mr. Warney said he had cut himself during the attack, but a medical exam showed no evidence of a cut.

That Mr. Warney claimed to have driven his brother's brown Chevrolet to the murder scene, a car that his brother had gotten rid of years earlier.

And so on and so forth.

There was no physical evidence — none — linking Mr. Warney to the crime. The only evidence against him was the confession, conveniently typed up by a detective.

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 "The prosecutors who went
Submitted by Ourstorian on May 22, 2006 - 1:41pm.

 "The prosecutors who went after Douglas Warney were seeking the death penalty. It didn't matter to them:

That Mr. Warney was delusional.

That Mr. Warney said that he had killed Mr. Beason in a struggle in the kitchen, when in fact the victim had been murdered in his bed." [ Et cetera...]

It also doesn't matter to the State Governors who refuse to grant clemency even in such questionable circumstances out of fear of looking "soft" on crime or because they don't give a damn.

I don't believe we'll ever know how many innocent people have been executed in this country. We do know, via the Innocence Project, about 177 men who were wrongly convicted and sentenced for murder.

Herbert's column reminded
Submitted by ptcruiser on May 22, 2006 - 2:18pm.

Herbert's column reminded me, again, of a scene in the late Joseph Heller's great, but still largely misunderstood, novel Catch-22. The scene takes place when two Army CID officers are questioning the chaplain as to how he came to be in possession of some allegedly stolen tomato plants. The chaplain denies having committed any crime at all. The response from his interrogators was that if he had not committed a crime then they would not be questioning him.

Too many police agents and prosecutors in this country don't care about the actual guilt or innocence of many of the suspects they arrest and interrogate. The fact that someone was arrested and questioned is often viewed as prima facie evidence of guilt. Because if that person was innocent then why would the cops arrest them unless they were guilty. The facts are then manipulated or ignored to support the presumption of guilt. To paraphrase the infamous Downing Street memo, the "facts are...fixed around the policy."