The wheels of justice: Dupree freed
The wheels of justice grind slow, but they grind exceedingly fine:
A Texas man declared innocent Tuesday after 30 years in prison had at least two chances to make parole and be set free ”” if only he would admit he was a sex offender. But Cornelius Dupree Jr. refused to do so, doggedly maintaining his innocence in a 1979 rape and robbery, in the process serving more time for a crime he didn’t commit than any other Texas inmate exonerated by DNA evidence.
“Whatever your truth is, you have to stick with it,” Dupree, 51, said Tuesday, minutes after a Dallas judge overturned his conviction.
Dupree might have gotten out in 2004 if he had just agreed to submit to a re-education program for sex offenders that required the “4 R’s:” recognition, remorse, restitution and resolution. He couldn’t do it; couldn’t recognize or show remorse for a crime he did not commit. Now the DNA evidence has exonerated him.
Like so many others who have been wrongly convicted, Dupree’s verdict rested almost entirely on eyewitness testimony. Eyewitnesses sound good and are often quite sincere, but unfortunately their testimony is not anywhere near as reliable as people tend to think it is. In Dupree’s case, only one eyewitness fingered him; the other did not. And yet he served thirty years.
It is always upsetting to hear something like that. But it is always good to know that an innocent person has finally been freed. And it helps that the state of Texas will be paying Dupree over two million dollars, tax-free, for his pain, although it will never be able to give him those thirty years back.
The Torah requires two or three eye witnesses for conviction of a capital crime. Not a bad idea. And if you give false testimony, the end that you intended for another falls upon you.
I’m also reminded of Ecclesiastes: The end of a thing is better than its beginning. When I see this smiling, healthy (I hope–it appears so) and forgiving man, my belief is that his attitude created an eternal wealth.
Two million isn’t enough. I hope he doesn’t squander it like a lottery winner.
Being wrong isn’t bearing false witness.
There aren’t enough CSIs in the USA to have scientific proof of every important crime.
So why the ###K did they wait so long? DNA tests have been around a LOT longer than 6 years! I know, the wheels of justice etc.. Funny how we find dollars for the stupidest of ideas but the fragile ego’s and conviction records of prosecutors prohibits blanket testing of off offenders with flimsy convictions. Disgusting doesn’t cover it..
This matter is both overblown and misrepresented. Barry Sheck, one of OJ’s lawyers, uses the case to villify the criminal justice process; conveniently ignoring the same process acquitted OJ of a heinous double murder.
It was not eywitness testimony that convicted this DNA-innocent man. It was the jury.
Jurors are as subject to error as the rest of us.
Ergo, due to error or intent by cop +/or prosecutor +/or jury, some innocents will be convicted, some guilty will go free. There are mechanisms and forces that can and do work to lessen error and malfeasance by cop +/or prosecutor, but there is no such for juries. Indeed, the legally most qualified among us to serve as jurors in high-viz cases today are the most ignorant and ill-informed.
It’s well and good to condemn eye-witnessing as less than infallible, but when that’s all you’ve got, no DNA testing yet, that’s all you’ve got. I do not subscribe to the doctrine, “Better 10 guilty go free than one innocent convicted”, which may have come from an old SCOTUS guy like Frankfurter.
A fallible process is what it is, and justice is served if it is understood that cuts both ways.
Eyewitnesses sound good and are often quite sincere, but unfortunately their testimony is not anywhere near as reliable as people tend to think it is.
all one has to do is watch this and learn about inattentional blindness…
http://viscog.beckman.illinois.edu/djs_lab/IB.html
they no longer seem to have it set up as a test you can take…
but you watch the video and count how man passes the people with basketball make.
then they ask you something about the video..
These recent studies are consistent with an earlier line of work examining the detection of unexpected events during a divided attention tasks (e.g., Neisser, 1979). In these studies, observers monitored one event while simultaneosly ignoring another similar event. For example, observers monitored one team of players passing a basketball while ignoring another team also passing a ball. Typically in these tasks the displays were physically superimposed so that the players were overlapping and partially transparent. While observers this task (e.g., counting the passes of the attended team), an unexpected event (UE) occurred.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
As in Mack & Rock’s studies, observers often failed to see the UE. These studies demonstrate that attention is directed to objects and events rather than spatial locations — the attended event was literally superimposed on the unattended event, yet observers still did not see the UE. Furthermore, these studies showed that observers could miss a suprathreshold UE that lasted for several seconds (as opposed to 200ms in Mack & Rock’s studies).
when a thing happens we are usually doing something else…
this is also related to split mind and suggestibility, which i also explained politicians use to dump crap into our heads (and refuse to answer the question asked. its for a reason!). and how radio ads work better when your driving, your splitting your attention, and so your consciousness doesn’t focus on it, but your subconscious does.
this is why the culture of rap has the dress it does also… the clothing is designed and worn so you cant describe the person well. the proportions and lines we use for reference are gone (of course this means that the ones that do things, cause innocent men to go to jail in their stead)
The Torah requires two or three eye witnesses for conviction of a capital crime. Not a bad idea.
actually it is…
studies show that most people (not all) will not go against a majority who are stating something wrong.
in the test they have two actors posing as fellow test takers and one real test takers.
they use an illusion to make the question seem to have two answers when there is actually only one right answer
the two actors basically are to say that the lines are different sizes while the third is left to choose to say the same or stress what they see is valid.
most dont go against the others…
a few do.. (i am that kind and i suffer for it greatly)
I dunno, Tom. When you are talking about the awesome power of the state to imprison and in some cases kill people based on the outcome of court proceedings, it makes a lot of sense to me to nudge error in the direction of incorrect acquittals rather than incorrect convictions. If I am understanding you correctly — which I may well not be — it seems you are quite sanguine about wrongful convictions because, well, that’s just the way it goes. I am wondering why, on a conceptual level, you reject the 10 guilty vs. 1 innocent aphorism. Is it to say incorrect acquittals are so intolerable we should be willing to accept innocents going to prison, or potentially being executed, as a trade off?
Although I must acknowledge your views (again, assuming I am understanding) have a fair amount of currency. In habeas cases, in the views of many, even proof of actual innocence is trumped by procedural failings on the part of the convicted, like missing a filing deadline by even a day.
I can make a lot more room for your views on the civil side, where a case being a roll of the dice is, if not what we shoot for, at least a lot more tolerable. To me anyway.
It has always seemed to me that a lot of prosecutors have higher political ambitions, so naturally they brag about their conviction record when running for higher office.
In other words, the unscrupulous ones don’t have any qualms about using innocent people as steppingstones for their own self-aggrandizement.
I do not subscribe to the doctrine, “Better 10 guilty go free than one innocent convicted”
The soviets, Germans, Chinese, Cubans, et al. didn’t either…
Beria said “show me the man and i will show you the crime”.
I mean once you don’t care about putting innocents in jail to catch guilty the logical thing to do is just grab who you want, it’s irrelevant anyway…
Still thing its good not to care about innocence or guilt? Which is what the alternative to that is…
And the quote is
“Better that ten guilty person’s escape than that one innocent suffer” said by William Blackstone
However the SOURCE of the concept of protecting innocents is from the bible…
It refers to the act of god in the destruction of So domand Gommorah…
pt 2
World’s oldest human remains claimed in Israel
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-world-oldest-human-israel.html
maybe the stories of the bible span more than the years we look at and so we think wrongly as to their historical validity…
that’s just musing and interest and i can tie a lot more together…
but the point is that when societies get wicked they fail… which then means if you can get people to forget their bible, they will get wicked and not see the moral failure by varying things from what they once had (take the antithesis point because the thesis is too familiar).
by the way, if you take the Noah story, and restrict the animals to the first domesticated ones only… then it makes a lot more sense. its no longer all the animals in the world, its now these special breeds that the early first real humans made and brought them out of starvation and deprivation to have society.
but as always, i digress… 🙂
[and if you judge not god in his actions, then what he did was not evil, but culling the herd to produce fitter social people. which would make the evil the sociopathic, the brutish, the uncooperative, the crazy, and so forth would be what would be culled. and given their lack of organization, such culling would look like the hand of god dealing circumstance]
now its time to bring in a heavy hitter thinker..
Moses Maimonides
he called it the 290th Negative Commandment.
killing or imprisoning a innocent man would lead to a slippery slope where less and less would be needed to convict a person, till no proof was needed (again, converging on the logical position), and whether a man is free or not, would rest on the states caprice (a judge representing the state and acting for it)
could this be why things were first tweaked in family court as we would put up with much more in deference to the idea of helping women and or children? and why they push wicked as liberating? and capriciousness in mate selection? and thinking they can vaccinate around diseases? and making tobacco us liberating? and a lot more…
Also remember that the method or point here is that if one is “wicked” and lives otherwise, the society that we have falls apart, atheistically it self destructs, religiously god made lots of bad luck and punishments.
but ultimately, our society as a vibrant functional one that outpaces all others, and to athiests and religious is blessed in some way that foils the designs of the first and creepily seems to prevent the destruction of the latter.
of course, such beneficence then would beg compliance for success… just like changing the reasonable woman ideal would make it very rewarding for the hypersensitive who step forward first (and very expensive for the rest – a millstone from god to us if your religious, a wast we have to tolerate to make the world Utopian to others).
we are made to seek benefit, and so if the state molds benefit, we will fall into line
and taking the opposite logical position, would put supreme power in the hands of the state to compel any way it wished, as it would have no limits.
keep grabbing innocents and killing them till the rest comply… how could one argue against it once its ok to lose innocents, and in so doing, make everyone guilty, their lives forfeit to the ones that happen to be in state at the time, and their children (in dynasty)
if you think this is long. i could go on for book length and barely scratch things. Aristotle, Goethe, British history, Economics, heck even Charles Dickens.
He was of the opinion that a “hundreds” of guilty people should go free!
“than that the possibility of any innocent man or woman having been sacrificed, should present itself, with the least appearance of reason, to the minds of any class of men!” Dickens
i will say that once the world was a bit more wicked, the alternative arguments came out, and if i could beg your attention for just a tiny bit more, will show the flow.
“it is better that ten innocent men suffer than one guilty man escape.” Chancellor Otto von Bismarck
“Better to execute ten innocent men than to leave one guilty man alive.” Feliks Dzerzhinsky Founder of the Checka (then GPU under the NKVD, then OGPU, and on it goes to FSB,SVR, and GRU today)
“When you cut down the forest, woodchips fly.” Nikolai Yezhov’s version of breaking eggs
“For us military men, everybody is guilty until proved otherwise. . . . Better to condemn an innocent man than to acquit a guilty one, because among the innocent condemned there may be a guilty man.” Major Nungo
so its interesting stuff…
if you want to study more, there is plenty!
though i suspect most will scroll past
so much, and so little space 🙂
Richard,
Appreciate your thoughtful reply.
I think it wrong to nudge (as you say) justice in either direction. I’m saying we are all fallible, every last one of us, and that’s really all. A certain amount of error is thus unavoidable. Minimize it, absolutely; but that’s not the same as a nudge. A nudge is tilting the pinball table, which I prefer to see solidly level.
I do have a problem with the 10 free guilty v. 1 incarcerated innocent calculus applied across the legal board. That would apply to murderers and other heinous criminals, not just petty criminals (e.g. “victimless crimes.”). There are profound social consequences to such incorrect acquittals.
Yes, it would suck to let murderers go free, but the concept was “expressed by the English jurist William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in the 1760s.”
I view it as a matter of pure justice – I’d rather have a heinous criminal go free than have robbed a man of his life, or even a couple of years of it.
As far as letting people go on technicalities (not that you mentioned it, but….), while I dislike the impact of it, I can see it as one of the best checks against the government (eg cops, prosecutors, etc). It’s a higher form of justice, and I hope that if I was ever involved in seeing someone who had harmed my family go free, that I would be able to see the big picture.
I have somehow failed to communicate my concern that the vicious freed-but-guilty are quite likely to commit further vicious acts. I do not seek incarceration simply as retributive punishment, but to remove serial malefactors from the public realm. That is the true cost to a society that lets 10 guilty go free lest 1 innocent be jailed.
Rickl said:
“a lot of prosecutors have higher political ambitions . . . In other words, the unscrupulous ones don’t have any qualms about using innocent people as steppingstones for their own self-aggrandizement.”
I quite agree – Can anyone say “Duke LaCrosse players and prosecutor Mike Nifong”?
While the notion of “ten guilty should go free rather than one innocent be sent to prison,” sounds wonderful, it ignores many unpleasant realities of the criminal justice system: first, from what I’ve read, most of the people who have been freed by the work of the “Innocence Project” have been freed, not because they didn’t commit the crime, but because of inadequacies in their trials. Second, when the cops are looking for the perps, they generally “round up the usual suspects,” that is, the known bad guys, not just random people off the street. Since the average criminal commits, IIRC, something like 10 crimes for everyone for which he is arrested, to say these are “innocents” is rarely so. Finally, where is the “Guilt Project,” with thousands of law students pouring over old uncleared or unprosecuted case files for evidence suuficient to convict?
When we get these problems solved, then I will be happy to join the “better to let 10 guilty men go free than send one innocent to prison” crowd.
And he’s of course still on dozens of vigilante lists of “perverts” from which he’ll never be removed because once someone accuses you of something, according to the maintainers of those lists, you’re guilty whether the courts agree or not.
And those lists are used by a lot of people to make the lives of those listed on them miserable, to the point where they find themselves incapable of finding jobs, housing, or if they find them they’re driven away by constant harassment.
Often the only solution is to undergo drastic plastic surgery, change your name, and move to another country entirely under a false identity.
Richard Saunders:
I don’t want to live on the same continent or in the same country as you. I certainly would never defend a country that had your idea of a justice system.
I also dare you to back up what you are saying about the innocence project. My understanding is that most of their exonerations either have DNA evidence or concern faulty eyewitness identification. Indeed, I’ve never seen a single case of theirs in which there wasn’t at least some evidence of actual innocence. Fact is, if they had the resources and time they’d have probably exonerated over a hundred times as many inmates as they have -like with rape victims, there’s a tremendous back log of old DNA evidence that remains to be tested for evidence of innocence.
Brad:
I stand corrected about the Innocence Project — in
their 265 exonerations there was evidence of innocence. There are many other such exonerations which have been based on trial erroirs, not on whether the accused actually committed the crime.
Where do you stand on the fact that only 3% of crimes result in more than 6 months incarceration? Where do you stand on a “justice system” which is more of an assembly line on the one hand, and a contest to see who has a better lawyer on the other?
Your answer gives you away — “there’s a tremendous backlog of old DNA evidence that remains to be tested for evidence of innocence.”
How about for evidence of guilt, Brad? You call it justice when all your concern is for the accused,
and none for the victim? You’re right about one thing — we certainly have a different idea aboiut how a “justice system” should work!
Richard:
Your idea of a “justice” system is more like a prosecution assembly line. One can run into examples of such a system in Texas as we currently speak – and eventually (to my sadness as I support the death penalty) it may bring about the end of the death penalty in that state because the state refuses to correct glaring errors.
Only 3 percent of what crimes are you talking about? I’m all for the legalization of *some* drugs and prostitution. I’m mostly not a fan of victimless crimes. I’m all for hard jail times for violent people.
Evidence of guilt? When many of the people in prison were convicted in part on tainted (jail house *snitch*) or mistaken eye witness testimony? More to the point DNA testing not only helps exonerate those who didn’t commit some crimes (particularly crimes of the sexual variety) but convict those who did, so it would be in the interests of everyone who gave a crap about justice to get more money into testing DNA. Nonetheless, many crimes honestly have little or no evidence besides the testimony of one person or the other so I’m afraid there won’t be the tons of evidence of guilt you are looking for. Indeed, if you’ve ever followed criminal law you’d notice that just about every legislative change involving criminal law over the past 40 years (with the exception of racial profiling legislation) has made it easier to convict people, not harder. That’s not in the american tradition.
I mistrust law enforcement and think about 5 or ten percent of the cops are downright corrupt. I also live in Baltimore city. Obviously, I must be black and a democrat, right?
Wrong. White and independent. And I support a presumption that an ordinary citizen should be able to carry around a firearm for self-protection. What I do not support is having the government try to guarantee my safety at the expense of either my liberties or any concern about my actual innocence.
Brad is generating more heat than light. DNA testing is relevant in what probable percent of violent crime, Brad? What’s your best guess?
As to your “5-10% of cops are corrupt” theme, Brad, that may be true, but corruption is usually motivated by financial greed, and my guess is that a boosted arrest record usually will fall short of that goal. What % of your co-workers do you estimate are petty thieves at work? What is the true rate of felonious workplace embezzlement, do you think?
My point is that all human endeavors are done by flawed, non-omniscient humans, so errors by whatever motive are inevitable. My 2nd point is that only juries convict. That’s the best we’ve got. Do you have a less imperfect process in mind?
Richard and I are concerned about the social costs of letting the violent escape incarceration. You know, the rapist who rapes again, the armed robber who practices his livelihood. Do you share that concern, Brad?
Tom:
And I’m worried about the social costs of imprisoning innocent people and having even more people lose faith in our justice system.
At least I’m consistent in that I think a well-armed citizenry is a good defense against crime.
As for whether I have better ideas in mind : why yes, yes I do. Indeed as an example, scientific based changes of line up procedures have been slowly implemented nationwide over the past 10 years, it’s only too bad that such things aren’t truly universal and that they really don’t help those convicted before the changes took affect.
As for hypothetical damages from a few recidavist bad apples, I’m rather sure that a properly applied system of escalating penalties including and up to the death penalty would take care of that, rather than throwing innocent people into jail to satisfy your fear and/or bloodlust.
You are not really responding to the issues I tried to raise, Brad. Recidivism is defined/measured by conduct of the previously convicted. The recidivism rate of violent felons is way more than a “few”. It’s not “hypothetical” either.
Scientific-based (your term) lineup systems are based on what science exactly?
You fear incarcerating the innocent. I do too. But it remains that we here are innocent until proven guilty, which is not true in some other Western countries.
I am troubled by the suffering inflicted by the bad guys who get to walk, but you seem to shrug that off. Maybe you need to be mugged by reality.
Fortunately we both believe in our 2nd Amendment right to carry. I’m not sure you can do that in Baltimore as freely as I can here.
There are corrupt police in Baltimore? I’m shocked! Shocked!
And the criminal justice system is an assembly line? It sure is! 150 strung-out or stoned slobs, supported by the ADA and the PD standing on either side, pleading guilty to lesser charges. And that’s only the morning docket! Been there, done that.
The only real trials are of the successful crimninals — they’re the only ones who can afford real lawyers.
And those are nothing more than Trials by Combat, except instead of knights as champions, the principals have lawyers.
Ask a criminal lawyer, either a Public Defender or a private lawyer, how many of his or her clients are actually innocent. He’ll laugh in your face. So what is the job of the defense lawyer? To try to get as much evidence as possible surpressed, and if she can’t suceed in getting it suppressed, to mislead and misdirect the jury, just like your hero Barry Sheck did in the OJ case.
And the best part? If the prosecution does succeed in convicting somebody, we send them to prison, where they learn to be better criminals! What a great system!
So, 10 violent criminals go free to prevent 1 innocent man from going to jail. And they commit more crimes?* Well, too bad. Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eegs, right, Brad?
*”Two-thirds of former state prisoners arrested for serious new crimes.” Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=1134
Ironic isn’t it?
I’m in far greater danger from both recidavist criminals and police bad apples than either of you two, and yet I’m not the one with my knees shaking worried about how the criminal justice system isn’t “Judge Dredd” enough.
Richard Saunders lives in a world, it seems, where every defendant has on OJ lawyer, and where the only abuses of process happen on the defense side of the aisle. He’d be well advised to talk to this guy :
http://williamlanderson.blogspot.com/2011/01/roger-roots-on-federal-rules-of.html
… though of course moving the Federal rules -or something very much like them- to the states is what many people like Richard think they want. When it is later used against them or theirs they might rethink this.
There’s also Paul Craig Roberts:
http://www.vdare.com/roberts/independent_review.htm
A quote: “Blackstone conceived of law as the people’s shield. It is better, he said, for ten guilty men to go free than for one innocent man to be convicted. In contrast, Bentham viewed the law as a weapon the government wields to punish criminals or anyone else in the name of the greatest good for the greatest number. He believed in rounding up people who might commit crimes. He wanted to restore torture to aid in securing convictions, and he believed that a defendant’s lawyer had an obligation to aid the prosecution.”
Seems you guys are Benthamnites.
As for Tom he wants me to link to some more evidence about eyewitness ID and photo lineups. I think this is laziness on his part, but I will do so:
http://www.apa.org/monitor/apr06/eyewitness.aspx
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0206/p01s02-usju.html
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/journals/258/police-lineups.html
I’m not even going to bother to get into some of the silliness involving plea bargains. That innocent defendents are often coerced to take a plea by piling on ridiculous hard to disprove charges and lots of potential jail time is a well-known fact and often comes up when one looks into an exoneration case. More to the point, the fact is the system RUNS on plea bargains! We have so many minor offenses that our overburdened justice system can’t keep up with them, thus many repeat offenders getting off with little or no punishment , while, ironically, someone who doesn’t take a plea might end up for a few years in the slammer for a first time offense.
There’s tons of reforms needed for our justice system on both the prosecution and the defense side of things, but heck, I’d say if they could only properly focus their resources on the real bad guys it would do a heck of a lot of addressing your complaints without making the US into a police state with kangaroo courts.
Just as I thought, Brad. Your links provide NO science to support your claim that better, “scientific-based” lineup procedures exist.
I did not ask you for “more evidence for eyewitness ID and photo lineups”.
You eagerly use the Alinsky personalizing tactic: I am “lazy”; we are “Benthamites.” You allege I/we said and/or feel things for which you have no factual basis. You do not respond to direct, clear questions.
I have not called you stupid, biased, closed-minded, though that you may be.
You are a fraud, sir. Stay in StenyHoyerland, where you belong.
Tom:
I don’t know what your gibberish is all about. My links speak for themselves.
I suggest you grow up and avoid the name-calling in the future. At least I think that Richard Saunders can give me an argument, and provide links to do so. Tom, might I suggest remedial schooling?
You asked for links, I gave you links. How is that not responding to direct questions? I think Sir, you are of the persuasion that if you tell a big enough lie perhaps people will believe it.
Tom:
Oh, might I suggest you READ my links to see if they have suggestions and make mention of experiments concerning line-up procedures? Because , having read them myself, I can assure you that they DO.