Man released from prison after 25 years: the Morton case
Call me a bleeding heart liberal if you want (or a bleeding-heart ex-liberal, or whatever suits your fancy). But I am outraged whenever I hear of a miscarriage of justice, especially in a murder case. And although the issue of the death penalty sometimes comes into it—after all, if a person has already been put to death, the remedies for a false conviction leave a lot to be desired—it’s not really about the death penalty. One can favor the death penalty in certain cases and still be very disturbed by incidents in which the evidence was inadequate in the first place and/or the conviction was the result of prosecutorial misconduct.
Case in point: Michael Morton. Morton can’t cry “racism,” because he’s white and his supposed victim (his wife) was also white. But he was falsely imprisoned anyway for 25 years, and it’s only because some DNA was tested that pointed to the guilt of another man that Morton was finally released yesterday at the age of 57 after spending the majority of his adult years in prison. Fortunately for him and his family, both his parents were still alive to see him walk free (or nearly free; he has to remain in Texas until some legal details are cleared up).
So, what happened? It now appears that there was almost certainly prosecutorial misconduct in Morton’s case: suppression of exculpatory evidence. It seems to have been an instance of a terrible murder and a lack of alternative suspects, and so the full court press was on to convict Morton because he was all the authorities had. Morton is especially lucky that some DNA was finally found; without it it would have been almost impossible to prove what’s called “actual innocence,” as the Troy Davis case demonstrated. Morton is also very lucky that the DNA not only matched that of another man with a record, but that it was also linked to a nearby crime with the same m.o., which had been committed after Morton was already in prision. Otherwise Morton would probably still be in prison despite a nearly complete lack of evidence against him in the case.
Did I say “lack of evidence”? You bet:
Michael Morton has always maintained his innocence of the murder of his wife Christine, who was found dead in their home by a neighbor the morning of August 13, 1986. At trial, the prosecution argued that Michael beat his wife to death after she refused to have sex with him upon returning from his 32nd birthday celebration at a restaurant. There were no witnesses or physical evidence linking Michael to the crime. The prosecution relied largely on the fact that Michael left a note to Christine on the bathroom vanity expressing his disappointment with the fact that she fell asleep on him. (The note closed with the words “I love you.”) Michael’s co-workers testified that he arrived at work at about 6 a.m. that morning and didn’t notice anything unusual about his behavior.
In addition, the state of Texas fought and successfully blocked Morton’s request to test the bandana for six long years. The following ought to outrage you, also:
In response to a Public Information Act request, the Innocence Project obtained the transcripts of the state’s chief investigator’s interview with the Christine’s mother that was conducted less than two weeks after the murder. In the transcript, she describes a conversation with the couple’s three-year-old son Eric, who told her in chilling detail that he witnessed an unknown man murder his mother.
The court papers note that this newly discovered evidence was turned over by the state Attorney General’s office in 2008 over the objection of Bradley, who personally reviewed the material and asked that it not be turned over because of the ongoing litigation over DNA testing.
There’s more about the suppressed evidence here.
I don’t see this as a liberal vs. conservative issue, or even primarily as a death penalty issue—although I think that before the death penalty is applied there should be a much higher standard of evidence against the defendant that was present in the Morton case (or Troy Davis’s, for that matter). I would think that conservatives, especially those concerned with the preservation of liberty, would be dedicated to making the legal system as airtight as possible. Not only is it a question of justice, but every single wrongful conviction undermines the public’s faith in that justice system. Preventing these incidents in the first place would be a whole lot better.
Another factor that’s not usually considered in these cases is the reaction of jurors on learning that they voted to convict a person and were deceived by a prosecutor into doing so. One of Morton’s jurors, Lou Bryon, speaks out on that very subject:
“Until this morning when I saw the headline, I thought [Morton] was still guilty,” she said.
News reports of the discovery of DNA on a bandana matching that of a convicted felon in California, coupled with the Innocence Project’s claims of suppressed evidence shocked her to her core.
“It’s criminal that I didn’t know all of these things that were never introduced to us,” she said…
I’ve been crying all day. You know, 25 years is a long time,” Bryan said. “He probably just doesn’t know how to cope what’s going on right this second; I guess I feel the same way. I feel for him. I really do.”
The state has a duty not just to the defendant to get it right and to come as close as it can to meting out justice. It has a duty to the general public, the family of the victim, and even to the jurors, who bear the solemn responsibility and burden of either executing or putting another human being away for life.
Neoneocon,
The following, IMO, is the damning comment in your post: “the conviction was the result of prosecutorial misconduct.”
The defense version of this is the California case where a man killed an infant girl and the defense attorneys plea bargained to get the death penalty off the table in return for the location of the young girl’s body. The body was found without a plea bargain, but when the case went to trial the defense attorneys, KNOWING THAT THEIR CLIENT WAS GUILTY, manfactured alternate “s/he coulda dunnits” to try and get their client acquitted.
The point. It seems to me that the legal system is no longer about innocence or guilt or about getting to the truth of the matter. These cases are simply notches on the canes of both the prosecution and the defense. It’s a game played by attorneys with lives (sometimes innocent lives) in the balance.
The question becomes, if this is just a game, why should anyone bother to obey the law? If this legal gamesmanship rewards gaming the system, why should WE be the ones who play by the rules? This fundamental disrespect for the law, inspired by those who work “within” it is, of course, the catalyst for broad-based anarchy.
I’ve heard that withholding exculpatory evidence is, would you believe it, a crime. If so, I want to see some convictions. Or at least somebody saying, “shame”, or, “better luck next time” is more likely.
I am always surprised that after 25 years of rape and forced (or understandable) drug abuse, that the innocent don’t come out as raving psychopaths.
If that was me I’d kill and kill (judges & prosecutors) until the cops had no choice but to gun me down.
.
If someone is wrongly convinced of a crime, they should have twice that time credited towards any future crimes.
It’s one thing to be outraged. It is quite another to figure out how to tighten the rules of the “game”.
Prosecutorial failure to divulge should be made a major crime in felony cases, since it is and long has been the duty of prosecutors to do so, if I understand correctly.
But public defenders are often neither the brightest bulbs, nor the most diligent of lawyers. What shall be done about that?
What is to be done about the temporal tortuosity of the appeals process in capital murder cases? And related absurdities?
There is (I forget where, ?TX) a Muslim who has been on death row since his conviction for shooting his ex-wife and her brother to death in 1992 -IN A COURTROOM-. And he has now achieved, though the legal process, a ban on pork in that state’s prisons, with his (next) execution date set for less than a year from now. He will have spent at least 20 years on death row, at a cost of >$2 million.
A rural, low population county in TX had its first capital murder in a generation a few years back. It costs those taxpayers a budgeted >$1 mill for trial and appeals. The next year that county had its 2nd capital murder. Murder is, fiscally, a local crime. What are these rural folks to do, double their taxes for a generation, or not seek the death penalty for reason of cost? I regret I do not know how that turned out.
T said: “It seems to me that the legal system is no longer about innocence or guilt or about getting to the truth of the matter. These cases are simply notches on the canes of both the prosecution and the defense. It’s a game played by attorneys with lives (sometimes innocent lives) in the balance.”
I can’t say IANAL, because IAAL, but I don’t practice criminal law, so my comments are no more informed than anyone else’s on account of my profession. But I think T may be misapprehending the appropriate roles of prosecutors and defense counsel. The prosecutor, as an agent of the state, is above all else to seek justice — it is in the job description that charges should be dismissed once it becomes evident that the defendant isn’t guilty, or there’s insufficient evidence to prove his guilt (not that those rules are often followed). The defense counsel, on the other hand, is not supposed to “seek justice,” but to ensure the state fulfills its burden of proof in a fair trial if it is to secure a conviction.
A “not guilty” plea should not be understood so much as “I didn’t do it” as much as “I am exercising my right to require you to prove I did it.” If a guilty defendant is acquitted because of a failure of proof, that’s the way the system is supposed to work, and it’s not the defense counsel’s role to say, “hold on here, you made a mistake, my guy is guilty.”
That is not to say the defense counsel in the case you mention acted appropriately; I don’t know anything about that case.
I should also add the legal system is indeed designed to get to the truth of the matter, through an adversarial system in which both sides put on the best case they can, and an impartial fact-finder ferrets out the truth. Theory is, of course, that in the struggle between the two sides, each presenting a self-serving case and trying to counter the case made by the other side, the truth will come out. But — other than the prosecutor’s charge to do justice — neither side is expected to do anything other than make the best case the evidence allows it to make for itself.
Richard Aubrey: yes, there may be a charge and even a conviction against this prosecutor.
But one of the dreadful things about the Morton case is that, even without the prosecutorial misconduct, there was no “there” there. That anyone could be convicted of murder on such flimsy evidence is not good at all (unless, of course, there was some other stronger evidence that none of the articles about the case mention; I doubt it). And the fact that the prosecutor’s misconduct was ever uncovered in the first place rests on a long chain of circumstances that might never even have occurred without the tireless and decades-long efforts of Morton’s family and lawyers. How many cases are there where this does not happen? The penalties against prosecutorial misconduct don’t seem to be enough to deter it as effectively as one would like, considering the seeming unlikelihood of it being discovered.
Very troubling indeed.
I agree neo about both the miscarriage of justice and this being neither a liberal nor conservative issue. Everyone ought to care about justice and the rule of law. This is the sort of case that breeds mistrust and with good reason. The system ought to finish the job by prosecuting the prosecutor.
neo.
I know deterrence rests on the combination of two factors; probability and consequences. If you get caught every time you rob a bank and pay $25 in fines, there’s no deterrence. If the penalty for bank robbery is hanging, drawing, and quartering but no bank robber has ever been caught in the history of the world, there’s no deterrence.
On the other hand, the reason to rob the bank is to get really, really rich. So there’s a powerful draw. You’ll pay the fine or risk the effectively non-existent punishment.
So let’s say we have an atavistic punishment for a prosecutor who withholds exculpatory evidence, and it happens once every half century. You’d think there’d be no deterrence, or very little. But there’s the issue of the draw of the result of prosecutorial misbehavior. How strong is that? What would be so attractive about the result that a prosecutor would risk anything at all?
My guess is that it’s probably a mild draw for those so inclined, and the deterrence (either high probability and low severity, or low probability and high severity) is so minimal that it can’t even offset the mild, not particularly exciting result of prosecutorial misbehavior. Which is to say, there’s not enough deterrence to put in your hat.
Too bad.
Richard Aubrey: actually, I’m afraid the draw is stronger than “mild.” In sensational murder cases in which there’s a suspect the prosecutor may think is guilty, there’s a strong temptation to convict rather than accept that there will be no one called to account for a case. Prosecutors’ reputations rely on convictions, and prosecutors are pretty driven people.
That’s not to say that most of them aren’t honest. It’s just that the temptations can be pretty strong to fudge things a bit.
Richard Johnston,
I am not an attorney, and I hope that I did not overstate my case above. I realize that the justice system isn’t a search for truth as much as it is a method of dispensing justice. My point, however, is that the system has gone beyond even that. When a defense attorney KNOWS his client is guilty and yet misrepresents the defense (someone else COULD have done it) the justice system is reduced to a win-at-all-costs match. In the Morton case, it appears that the prosecution fell into that same fetid swamp.
Again, I am not an attorney, but as a sentient American citizen I submit that the defense attorney’s job is to make sure that the rights of the accused are not trampled by the system (concocting “coulda dunnits” for a defendant of known guilt violates that premsie), and likewise in my mind the prosecutor’s job is to see that justice is served upon the guilty. Clearly a win-at all-costs premise obliterates the possibility of serving any justice at all.
To paraphrase my law school Crim Law professor, “the adversary system is the greatest engine for determining who has the better lawyer that has ever been produced.”
I agree with most of this, but I disagree with the statement that ‘it is not a liberal or conservative issue.”
Conservatives distrust powerful governments, and this is a classic case of a powerful government agency run amok. The old cliche about power corrupting is very true.
I have a friend who is a public defender. He could make a lot more money in private practice, and he is not the kind of person whom you would expect to be a defense attorney. When I asked him why he became a public defender, he said that one of the big reasons was the number of cases of prosecutorial misconduct he had seen. Conservatives ought to be more aware of this issue.
The death penalty needs to be abolished, life without parole is just a slow motion execution anyway; at least this man was finally exonerated, while he could be vindicated, and can have some semblance of a peaceful life with what is left…
Deliberate legal misconduct by prosecuters or defense lawyers should be a felony…
Errors such as this are unconscionable. The state cannot be allowed to kidnap people. Imprisonment needs to be abolished.
I think we should all hearken unto Richard Johnson’s reasoned views above.
Neo might cool off a bit. She might even say IANARL.
Deliberate legal misconduct by prosecuters or defense lawyers should be a felony…
Since lawyers have access to the actual evidence, imagine how much harder they’ll try to hide (or destroy) exculpatory evidence, once they realize that if they get caught, they’re going to jail.
The treatment may be worse than the disease.
“I would think that conservatives, especially those concerned with the preservation of liberty, would be dedicated to making the legal system as airtight as possible. Not only is it a question of justice, but every single wrongful conviction undermines the public’s faith in that justice system. Preventing these incidents in the first place would be a whole lot better.”
I am a conservative, and I am a lawyer, and I agree that we must make the legal system as airtight as possible. The resistance to doing DNA testing is criminal in and of itself.
“Ken Anderson prosecuted the case. He now is a district court judge in Williamson County. KVUE attempted to contact him, but was unsuccessful.”
This Anderson guy and every single person involved in this monstrous miscarriage of justice should taste a little “justice” themselves. Can they be cashiered like Nifong was?
Callahan
That, if you’re correct, reduces the likelihood of being caught. We correct the deterrence factor by ramping up the consequences.
It may be the case, I wouldn’t know, that the act of literally destroying the evidence–hiding is only temporary–would produce evidence, thus being not a useful technique.
Playing fair might be the only defense. Hey. They should teach that in law school.
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Inadequate deterrence is only half the problem. People are as motivated by incentives as they are by penalties.
As Beverly points out, the prosecutor is now a judge. He became a judge based in large part on his prosecutorial track record.
It should be automatic that once it is learned a judge achieved his position in part by engaging in prosecutorial misconduct of the nature demonstrated in the Morton case, he should be immediately removed from the bench and permanently disbarred.
But what about the judge’s right to due process? I say if the evidence is strong enough to release a man who the judge as a prosecutor wrongly convicted, then that is all the “due process” that should be required to remove the judge and take away his license to practice law.
An innocent man lived in a fricking cage for 25 years so that an ambitious, overzealous prosecutor could advance his career by knowingly suppressing evidence.
These abuses of power for personal gain are in many ways as repugnant as the vilest of crimes.
We had a case here in Escondido CA (San Diego county) where a drifter killed a girl in her home. The police tried to prosecute her teenage brother.
The truth did come out, but it was a close run thing.
There was another famous case where a father was blamed for his daughter’s rape. The girl insisted a stranger did it, until sometime after the Child Protection people got a hold of her and managed to convince her her father did it. The judge in the case was aware of a rapist who was preying on the neighborhood with a simialar MO, but didn’t bother to bring in those facts. Father was conviced IIRC, until DNA brought the actual rapist to justice.
I think it isn’t a conservative vs “liberal” issue. The Child Protection Services types are typically not conservatives, and some are men hating feminists who target the father (brother, etc) and ignore evidence of an outside intruder. The police tend to go with the probabilty that it’s a family member as the most likely answer, and also fall back on the Child Protection Services propaganda almost reflexively.
The problem isn’t capital punishment. The problem is a broken justice system.
Stories like this one absolutely infuriate me. It’s hard enough to get convict the guilty; imprisoning an innocent man will make convincing a jury of a criminal’s guilt that much harder. So the injustice here is that an innocent man spent 25 years of his life for the murder of his wife, the man who actually did commit the crime was never convicted for it, and some guilty bastage down the road will likely go free thanks to this story.
Our justice system truly is broken.
We’ll see what the Texas bar does about this case, especially the judge.
My guess is he gets an award.
No, I don’t like lawyers.
since they play investigate by statistics, their operations are skewed by such. so the feminist idea of partners always being the oppressor, means that when something happens, they waste all their time on the husband…
Which is how someone like Clara Harris can have her step daughter in the car yelling to stop and run over her mate 3 times with the car and then what?
or maybe bobbits wife getting woman of the year and all that for mutliating the sexual organs of another person.
he would probably NOT have gone to jail IF we have not alreayd predisposed the public this way for social engineering purposes.
in MY CASE… why look for another? why even try to find a body? i was being convicted without a corpse, no crime scene, manufactured evidence, abusive questioning, their gaming the lie detector test, and a whole lot more…
why? because the boyfriend or husband is the one who did it… he has replaced the “butler”…
It seems to have been an instance of a terrible murder and a lack of alternative suspects, and so the full court press was on to convict Morton because he was all the authorities had.
its MORE than that… its because the feminists will NOT let ANY man go free, or even consider a woman did it, or alternative culpable reasons…
Morton is especially lucky that some DNA was finally found; without it it would have been almost impossible to prove what’s called “actual innocence,”
in my case, it was WORSE…
how so?
at least in his case they had a dead body a crime scene, and evidence… in my case, they had just convincted a man on flimsy evidence of dumping the body from a plane at sea… with a precident of not needing a body, not needing the crime scene, and so forth… they were happy to go and USE THE FEMINIST dialogue in the minds of people to get a conviction…
i would never have been able to prove innocence since there was no actual crime, so there would never be evidence..
i was lucky she decided to appear and try to take the child she abandoned… (and whom the cops grabbed and handed to her despite it all – after all, i was told by a judge i have no rights)
Michael beat his wife to death after she refused to have sex with him upon returning from his 32nd birthday celebration at a restaurant
that fits whose conceptualization of reality?
“Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometime gain from the experience,” — Catherine Comins, Vassar College Assistant Dean of Student Life in Time.
Have you ever read things like “Feminist Criminology”?
its what you DONT know thats going on behind the scenes that matters…
this leads to “standpoint feminists”…
now remember, men and women are equal, the same and have the same abilities… and think the same is what the public says… despite them also saying women are better, etc…
Standpoint theorists believed men and women experienced and perceived the world in different ways and therefore it is important for women to have a voice in interpreting their behavior, as opposed to having it decided by beliefs and sanctions that do not include women’s experience. Standpoint theorists want to incorporate the meanings of women’s experience and diversity around the perception of the accused or accuser.
Feminist standpoint theory asserts that human materiality, the biological, physical activities, and possessions, shape the way knowledge is formed and delineates the inequalities of patriarchal thought. If crime is seen as an act of aggression, and men are biologically characterized for their aggressive nature than not only is criminal theory male centered, so is the criminal practice. If society accepts that men are predisposed to aggression, which leads to crime, then women are socialized as passive actors and consequently many times the victimized. The implications for women are their sense of powerlessness and far reaching dependency upon men.
Males are predisposed to aggression…
The masculinity of the victim as it is depicted through criminal theory and public observation has altered the ways in which particular crimes are addressed.
my source for this is http://www.tulane.edu
[Naffine, Ngaire. Feminism and Criminology. Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1996. where she mostly quotes her own work to herself]
from wiki:
now here comes the FUN part…
this all then refers to the STRAIN THEORIES…
In criminology, the strain theory states that social structures within society may pressure citizens to commit crime. Following on the work of é‰mile Durkheim, Strain Theories have been advanced by Robert King Merton (1938), Albert K. Cohen (1955), Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin (1960), Robert Agnew (1992), and Steven Messner and Richard Rosenfeld (1994). Strain may be either:
yes the SAME cloward of cloward an piven!
what this is all about is defining in hard terms the reasons why womens loyalty to their mates should be transferred to the state and feminists (a form of psycho-political game where one can shift loyalties)…
Beverly Eakman says: ‘Psychopolitics is as the art and science of asserting and maintaining dominion over the thoughts and loyalties of individuals, officers, bureaus, and “the masses,” via various techniques ranging from “group dynamics,” “cognitive dissonance,” “de-sensitization,” “super-imposing alternate value structures,” “artificial disruption of thought,” the Delphi Method, the Tavistock Technique, to negative or positive “reinforcement.”‘
eakman is one of the education wistleblowers…
like a isserbyt, and others i have mentioned, she has endeavord to show how the educcan system admittedly co opted as Bella Dodd Testified, and been using these soviet techniques.
though hers is more against the mental health fields complicity and willingness to accept the practices of Dr Mengele as normal
“…In Walking Targets, B. K. Eakman sounds the alarm on psychology-based programs in schools, and on the more general psychology-based mindset that treats every individual quirk as a classifiable mental illness demanding medication.”
Phyllis Schlafly
so this is all the reason why someone like mr Morton cant get the DUE PROCESS they should have gotten.
every conviction confirms a world view now..
and its this list (in which some of the points are FALSE, but most dont know how or why or what):
Feminist argue criminological texts neglect the victimisation of women; the victimisation of women is forgotten:[5]
Three out of four women will be victims of violent crimes during their lives.[6]
Violence is the leading cause of injuries to women aged 15 to 44.[6]
50 per cent of homeless women and children are fleeing domestic violence.[6]
Assault is the largest cause of injury to women in the US.[6]
Less than 1 per cent of rape victims have collected damages.[6]
Domestic violence costs the state between 5-10 billion each year.[7]
note that i can show you nursing manuals which clearly show that ALL inter partner violence is caused by the male… ALL OF IT… so when a man comes into the hospital with a steak knife in the shoulder… its his fault!!!!
he had to do someting, as the whole machine says the victim is never to blame…
really? can anyone here show a real reason that a victim is to blame for something that happens? criminally to blame, maybe not, but functionally to blame, definitely… (notice the failure to get this has things like slut walks, where they pretend that all men will rape them)
well the ones pushing the power button disagree
“If anyone is prosecuted for filing a false report, then victims of real attacks will be less likely to report them.” — David Angier (Massachusetts District Attorney)
ie… your point is only valid if we discover that the person was innocent.. but most of the time you cant, and the system wants to presume guilt….
the prosecutor benefits
the feminists benifit
the alleged victim, who may not be a victim, benifits
the society is said to benefit (as its better to put them all away)
how far does this hatred go by the professors, prosecutors, judges, and academics?
to the same extent that the socialists blame judaism for everything!!!!!!!!
“If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.” — Mary Daly, former Professor at Boston College, 2001
i dont think she minds that men go to jail falsely
remember micheal nifong?
a prosecutor who now is disbarred for trying to rail road a bunch of white guys into prison at the behest of a very questionable black woman…
it was a tour de force of feminist force applied to prosecutors…
this is now probably too long…
but i want to point out that he wasnt convicted on evidence… and technically exculpatory evidence was not needed!!!!!!!!! they had no proof he did it other than they had no one else, and feminists do not let the police look to someone else unless there is a reason to – ie, its always the partner until there is a reason it isnt…
and under feminist justice and pushing, as with nifong, and many others, your guilty until proven innocent..
i will continue the view of the jurors and others in the next post…
Richard Aubrey: I don’t think there was any wrongdoing alleged on the part of the original judge—and in any event I believe he is deceased. Perhaps by “judge” you mean the original prosecutor who is now a judge?
1. Book Says:
Our justice system truly is broken.
And our political system.
Good luck trying to get (most) leftists interested in a miscarriage of justice involving a gun crime or “hate” crime. And too many people on the Right are willing to indulge in an authoritarian attitude as long as abuse of government power is not directed at them.
2. Don Says:
The problem isn’t capital punishment. The problem is a broken justice system.
That could well be true, but until the justice system is repaired, my skepticism about capital punishment is growing. A reasonable person could argue that suspending capital punishment is a reasonable stopgap until the justice system is fixed.
And I wonder if the justice system is moving in the opposite direction from being repaired.
Juror who convicted Morton feels guilty
Wants to know why evidence was withheld
http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/crime/Juror-who-convicted-Morton-feels-guilty
i also want to point out that our population has been dumbed down.. they cant think logically… thats been broken so that they can make illogical leaps for the cause.
if you read it, you will ‘get’ that the jury was filling in the story… ie. just as we do here… as we are trained to do now… rather than perceive and see we have a hole..
you see… they are trained by the media (just watch the cop shows and fbi shows and how they ALWAYS mention the domestic statistics and explain THATS Why they never look at someone else! they SAY so! its also safer… they look at someone else, and its the husbadn, you get feminists going nutters. they look at the husband and wrongly convict? no one cares.. so the squeeky wheel gets the oil and its easier to convict the innocent with the harridens willing to destroy careers for literally NOTHING)
but look at that logic..
they didnt find the weapon, so they insert a story to make it ok… ie, the husband hid it..
how is that logical thinking, other than the logic that the husband did it, or “9 times out of 10 the victim knows their attacker”…
we also conflate and dont get the proportions of arguments right.
from know it forward:
In 95% of sexual assualt incidents reported on college campuses, the victim knows their attacker
beating up your wife is a sexual assault
so you convict you have a 95% chance of being right!!!
abc news channel 17:
80-90% of sexual assault reports show the victim knows their attacker.
The official paper of the university of new haven
Only 2-4% of sexual assaults are reported to the police and four out of five times the victim knows their attacker.
[so far we have 95%,85%, and 75%…]
Eagle Tribune
“Sometimes it is out of fear. The victim knows their attacker best,” she said.
from a block discussion Gretchen from the east side says…
For what it’s worth, it seems to me, in my unexpert opinion and just what i gather from watching the news, that most of the murders seem to be where the victim knows their attacker. Sooooooo, just don’t get to know any murderers and you’re cool.
from Safe States, An alliance to strengthen the practice of injury and violence prevention.
Leslie Mateer is a sexual assault prevention coordinator with the Women’s Resource Center in Beckley. Mateer advises men and women who are victims of sexual assault. She says 9 times out of 10, the victim knows their attacker. She calls it acquaintance rape, where the rapist may be a friend, family member, neighbor or co-worker.
how can this statistic EVER change?
the stat on how much women earn compared to men hasnt changed (but it has and the original is now known to be false!)
same with the state on domestic violence during super bowl… the rule of thumb… womens medicine getting less money… and so on…
from a feminist domestic violence org
http://www.joyfulheartfoundation.org/sexualassault_learnthefacts.htm
90% of sexual assaults are committed by someone the survivor knows
and they include shows on TV you can watch that reinforce the message!!! This season’s second episode of Law & Order SVU tackles male sexual assault with “Personal Fouls”
http://www.ncdsv.org/images/SexualAssaultStatistics.pdf
In 8 out of 10 rape cases, the victim new the perpetrator [though on a later page they say: 77% of completed rapes are committed by someone who is known to the victim – National Sexual Violence Resource Center]
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, nearly 6 out of 10 rape/sexual assault incidents are
reported by victims to have occurred in their own home or a the home of a friend, relative, or
neighbor.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, an estimated 91% of the victims of rape and sexual
assault are female and 9% are male. Nearly 99% of the offenders they described in single-victim
incidents are male.
once they claimed he raped her…
all this information plugged into us over 40 years of constant droning kicked in.
he had to be guilty, so he had to have hidden the murder weapon… COMMON SENSE
and common sense is based on common knowlege
and socialists and social engineering injects lies as common knowlege to get social outcomes.. like women hating their mates and regarding all of them as rapists or about to attack JUST LIKE MY BOSS!!!
http://www.rvap.org/_docs/pdf_documents/sexual%20assault%20statistics.pdf
Women of all races are about equally vulnerable to violence by an intimate.
The overall probability that a rapist will be sent to prison for his crime: 16.3%.
this kind of stat makes people loath to let an innocent person go..
Of surveyed college women, about 90% of rape and sexual assault victims knew
their attacker prior to the assault
o Fisher, Bonnie S., Francis T. Cullen, and Michael G. Turner. “The Sexual
Victimization of College Women.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S.
Department of Justice, 2000.
In 8 out of 10 rape cases, the victim knew the perpetrator
o Tjaden P, Thoennes N. Full report of the prevalence, incidence, and
consequences of violence against women: findings from the national
violence against women survey. Washington (DC): National Institute of
Justice; 2000. Report NCJ 183781.
84% of women who are raped know their assailant.
o Kilpatrick, D.G., C.N. Edmunds and A. Seymour. Rape in America: A
Report to the Nation. (1992) Arlington, VA: National Victim Center.
Approximately 73% of rape victims know their assailant
o 2005 National Crime Victimization Survey
you will find that the number of convictions of innocents went up a whole lot once this kind of reality was established then never let to change ever again!
from an article in the statesman:
– The sheriff zeroed in on Morton almost immediately and was ready to make an arrest within a week of the murder.
– The medical examiner, using a questionable technique, declared a time of death that destroyed Morton’s alibi.
– The prosecutor presented a blistering condemnation of Morton as cruel, manipulative and sexually abnormal.
understand that the minute the murder happens and they have no evidence the case is then brought up and worked from a family member…
it makes such numbers confirmatory
the police stop investigating, and play the odds
if 95% of the time its the family guy, why should i waste most of my time trying to find a 5% that 95% of the time wont be there?
and THAT is the purpose… as the feminists use the number of men convinced in a way that racialists are not allowed to point out for Spanish and African populations.
Ken Anderson was the prosecutor…
“Life in prison is a lot better than he deserves,” Anderson, now a state district judge, said at the time.
Over seven days of trial, Anderson called 20 witnesses to support the prosecution theory of events that transpired after 9:15 p.m., when the family left a downtown Austin seafood restaurant where they celebrated Michael Morton’s 32nd birthday.
they had common sense to imagine he got rid of the murder weapon.. how about common sense that people coming home from a birthday celebration generally arent going to beat their wives to death?
you see… common sense comes from common information that used to be better before the political injections
the man concedes that he wanted sex after the party and that his wife and he argued over it previously. but she fell asleep and he wrote that note, and the rest became revisionist history…
yeah… of course…
how did he know he was seething getting out of bed?
That should not be allowed as its not even hearsay!
oh.. then claim that a porn movie has a murder in it.. which is it, is he watching porn, or watching a murder mystery… or does he masturbate to murder mysteries as porn?
how did the prosecutor know he masturbated over the scene? was that part of the evidence?
you see… with that statistic, no one looks for another perpetrator…
if you had a bet in a casino in front of you and you had a 95 5 split… would you bet on the 5?
ok.. how did they know he took the gun and put it in the purse? the murder weapon was never found, and the prosecutor was telling a story!!
in MY Case… they told the story of how i, on the way to the airport to pick up my son from a family visit… disposed of the body somewhere in the swamps around Newark (too big to search at all) then finished the trip…
given that the victim is not dead… that was just a story. and i know why and how, as they told me what they were doing and so on… (part of trying to get me to act out for confirmatory stuff)
i lost all my friends… not that i had a lot
i lost my career in fortune 10, never got that back
lost my reputation..
lost all my money and savings
was homless for a short while
lost my son
lost parts of my family that said, we all know that its mostly the men who do this.
so i DO know the mentality as the time that it happend to him, was around the same time that this happened to me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They called a video store employee to the stand to verify that Morton had rented two adult movies. Jurors also watched a two-minute snippet from “Handful of Diamonds,” which Morton admitted watching, to establish its sexual content.
but didn’t Anderson say that he went back and got the idea for the murder from the movie?
in my case, they brought up a few movies that would supply the plot for their case…
Next-door neighbor Elizabeth Gee found Christine’s body in the early afternoon on Aug. 13, 1986, but most of her time as a prosecution witness was spent establishing aspects of Michael Morton’s character.
and waht did she say?
Michael Morton never yelled, never got violent, Gee said, but he initiated many of the arguments, called Christine a “bitch” and cursed angrily and regularly, even in front of their son.
ah… signs of domestic violence as the academy and feminists redefined it!!!!!!!!!!! so the rest was statistical…
another thing is lack of emotion..
oh.. they had a feild day with me on that..
you see… i was this cold killer..
but since i knew i didnt kill anyone, what or how should i have acted? the testimony as to emotional outbursts works both ways… and no way… its too easy to twist it to head i win tails you lose
there is no law that says sociopathy is criminal. not all sociopaths attack people or hurt people. many are very successful.. but their lack of emotional response does not make them automatically guilty… just as a lot of emotional response speaks nothing too.
one BIG thing to notice is how they take your actions and put big meaning on it. ie.. in my case… they pretended i said things like i wish you were dead… they decided my cleaning up the house was abnormal… and so on…
its not real case building… but its now formal along psych lines… which is not the same thing as a real case… which is why they say they build one… not find one or other terms…
here, i will show you:
so, here you have the icon of the feminsts stats. an abusive man who beats his wife, a capitalist, and she a victim of domestic violence…
the rest was easy, as no jury wants to acquit a rapist/murder AND deviant (in excess of just plain old rape and murder)
now.. if he did react… they woud have said how he faked it… by not reacting, they say he was cold and must have known..
was or is he sociopathic? austistic? fed up? or the words and implications didnt sink in?
you tell me… the point though is to call the jurors normal, and use their idea of normal to prosecute along the lines of not the same as me…
if it was blindness not emotions, it would be a jury convicting the blind for not having sight.
ok… so somehow his emotional state before the miranda reading is allowed as evidence?
and i will confirm that the police play games like that. ie. they react and you read, and you dont react right because of this game… so your going to be guilty no matter what you do, if they set their eyes on you and have no evidence your innocent (like evidence of someone else)
they play the political.. knowkng that if they wrongly convict an innocent white guy with no rights… no one will say anything… 28 years shows that to be true
but if you convict a guilty black guy… you can get lots of sympathy… an innocent one, even more… if you convict and are harsh with a female, your going to get the crap…
but since our society doenst care about criminals, and dont care about domestic oppressors, and dont care about whtie guys who have all the privelege…
there was no one to care for Morton!!!!!!!!!!!!!
at that time you let him go, and you got all the crap.
in 1988, working girl came out.
Farrah Fawcetts movie “the burning bed” had come out a few years beore that in 1984, and
this was the same time my case happened…
the police and everyone were keen to show the feminsits and such that they were not going to let those mean men go free..
this was the watershed change that made it ok for a woman to murder a defensless man she claims was abusive (he may or may not be), and claim that the murder was a form of self defense.
this changes the burden for self defense asymetrically… it also set the stage for bobbit almost 10 years later… in that she was justified in cutting his penis off.
so his case happened in the middle of all this after the movie and more movies…
Having turned the book into a made-for-television movie, Goldemberg’s screenplay, “The Burning Bed”, premiered on NBC on October 8, 1984. The movie, directed by Robert Greenwald, starred Farrah Fawcett as Francine Hughes and Paul LeMat as Mickey Hughes.
The movie was filmed in Rosharon, Texas.
so the movie even had more influence in texas!!!
Robert Greenwald (born August 28, 1945) is an American film director, film producer, and political activist.
Various sources have described Greenwald’s political activism as left-wing / Greenwald has lectured at Harvard University for the Nieman Foundation for Journalism and speaks frequently across the country about his work / Since May 2005, Greenwald has been a contributing blogger to The Huffington Post
Greenwald is the founder of Brave New Films, a liberal media company that has published documentary…
For his activism, Greenwald has been honored by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, the Los Angeles chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, Physicians for Social Responsibility, the New Roads School, Consumer Attorney’s Association of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy and the Office of the Americas. He is co-founder (with actor Mike Farrell) of Artists for Winning Without War, whose purpose is to advance progressive causes and voice opposition to the Iraq War.
so there was a huge push then…
its what has defined our culture since
its why there are over 20 offices for women…
but NO offices for men!
its why breast cancer is underfunded with over a half billion a year in support, and prostate cancer is over funded with not even a 10th of that..
heck… there is even an organization of judges working to free women… but not men… and no there is no organization of male judges working to free convicted men…
Whatever they may be in public life, whatever their relations with men, in their relations with women, all men are rapists and that’s all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws, their codes.
Marilyn French “The Women’s Room”
“I claim that rape exists any time sexual intercourse occurs when it has not been initiated by the woman, out of her own genuine affection and desire.” — Robin Morgan, in 1974
“And if the professional rapist is to be separated from the average dominant heterosexual [male], it may be mainly a quantitative difference.”
— Susan Griffin “Rape: The All-American Crime”
“Politically, I call it rape whenever a woman has sex and feels violated. You might think that’s too broad. I’m not talking about sending all of you men to jail for that.” — Catherine MacKinnon “A Rally Against Rape” Feminism Unmodified
Mackinnon is a constitutional lawyer / and feminist legal theorist… and has changed the burden of proof in such cases.. [from this one, to the duke case, to my case, and literally hundreds of thousands of them over the past 40 years]
inuendo and hearsay are allowed as evidence as if it was witnessed…
Men who are in prison for rape think it’s the dumbest thing that ever happened… they were put in jail for something very little different from what most men do most of the time and call it sex. The only difference is they got caught. It may also be true.
Catharine MacKinnon
“Patriarchy requires violence or the subliminal threat of violence in order to maintain itself… The most dangerous situation for a woman is not an unknown man in the street, or even the enemy in wartime, but a husband or lover in the isolation of their home.” Gloria Steinem in Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem, pp. 259-61..
it was also years after you had to agree that these quotes are correct or you cant get a degree!!! ie, womens studies became required… and to pass, you had to agree..
so they have been cranking a polity that believes the above, even if the older ladies dont think so…
“The fact is that the process of killing – both rape and battery are steps in that process- is the prime sexual act for men in reality and/or in imagination.”. Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 22..
“The newest variations on this distressingly ancient theme center on hormones and DNA: men are biologically aggressive; their fetal brains were awash in androgen; their DNA, in order to perpetuate itself, hurls them into murder and rape.” Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 114..
and on understanding why they claimed that stains on a sheet from normal sex are evidence he stood over the corpse and masturbated…
“One can know everything and still be unable to accept the fact that sex and murder are fused in the male consciousness, so that the one without the imminent possibly of the other is unthinkable and impossible.” Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 21..
“In everything men make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, still their sobs as they mourn the empitness and alienation of their lives.” Andrea Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, p. 214..
bottom line:
“Who cares how men feel or what they do or whether they suffer? They have had over 2000 years to dominate and made a complete hash of it. Now it is our turn. My only comment to men is, if you don’t like it, bad luck – and if you get in my way I’ll run you down.” Signed: Liberated Women, Boronia. (Herald-Sun, Melbourne, Australia – 9 February 1996)
neo. Correct. The prosecutor who is now a judge will no doubt be getting prizes for his work from his colleagues. If he’s gotten them in the past, any suggestion they be withdrawn would be greeted with contemptuous laughter from his colleagues.
Accused often guilty until proven innocent
http://www.statepress.com/archive/node/7761
Guess what? thats NOT the Duke case! its ANOTHER case that never made it to the big time
When it comes to crimes of sexual assault, we seem to always be in a rush to accuse and condemn the alleged perpetrators. Faced with such heinous crimes, we disregard the judicial process, favoring the rights of the victim and ignoring the rights of the accused.
Dominic Strauss khan
Where was the protection of his innocence until proven?
why do we allow perp walks if the perps are innocent?
while this case is about a dead person, the facts around FALSE ACCUSATIONS is a good rule of thumb for our attitudes and actions when sex is brought into the picture by a prosecutor (for good reason as he wants to win even if he is wrong)
According to a 1996 Department of Justice report, “in about 25 percent of the sexual assault cases referred to the FBI … the primary suspect has been excluded by forensic DNA testing.”
25%… do we treat those cases as if all the perpetrators are innocent, or do we treat them as if they are guilty and the women NEVER make a false statement?
the feminists have been pushing that women never do, and i can quote it.
(and as quoted above, if they do, then a man can learn – same quote a psychopath gave to a researcher when asked aobut his victims!!! they died but look how much they learned).
In a nine-year study of 109 rapes reported to the police in a Midwestern city, Purdue sociologist Eugene J. Kanin reported that in 41 percent of the cases the complainants eventually admitted that no rape had occurred. In a follow-up study of rape claims filed over a three-year period at two large Midwestern universities, Kanin found that of 64 rape cases, 50 percent turned out to be false.
want to stop injustice? you can start with the feminists.. they are responsible for more innocence in jail than anything else!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
This controversy isn’t about men versus women, he said/she said. It’s about truth. The men Ndonye accused of rape were in jail for nearly a day before they were released. If not for video evidence, they may have spent 25 years in prison for first-degree rape.
25 years, 28 years.. who cares. they can learn something and the public feels good..
Jeffrey Deskovic
Larry Vandeferberg
Daniel Armijo
Edwin Ehlers
Courtney Bisbee
Steve Karban
Raye Dawn Smith
all are people supposedly/alledgely falsely convicted in cases similar to Mortons, in that they all are influenced by the new feminism…
Jeffrey Deskovic
served 16 years in prison for a murder and rape that took place in NY. All 16 years, I fought to prove my innocence. At the innocent age of 16, I was arrested based upon a coerced false confession obtained from me following 7 1/2 hours of police interrogation. I was convicted DESPITE DNA evidence which showed that semen found inside of the victim did not match me. In addition, hair found on the victim did not match me. I was sentenced to 15 years to life, notwithstanding the judge commenting, “Maybe you are innocent.”
so what?
who cares…
Danie Armijo claims to be falsely accused by a 27 year old woman… he hired him to be a dj at a party…
MANY ar convicted beacuse their ex wifes or girlfriends find it easy to say they abused the children…
there is NO PUNISHMENT for false claims…
NONE… today some are prosecuted for things like perverting the course of justice, etc.. courts do not tend to award damages to the man who was hurt this way… he loses EVERYTHING.. i know, i lost it.
former Goshen College student who falsely reported that she was abducted and raped has been sentenced to 18 months of probation and ordered to perform 200 hours of community service. / a judge also suspended an 18-month prison sentence that Jessica De La Vega could have faced under her conviction of obstructing justice.
Heath Kirk, 22, who lost part of his leg serving in Afghanistan was falsely accused… how did they report the news? with him wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. the girl accused him of kidnapping…
If the report had been accurate, it would have stated: “A man was arrested on the basis of a woman’s claim that he kidnapped and rape her. The man denies the allegation and claims the woman is lying. Police are investigating.”
in THIS case he happened to have taken cell phone pictures…
she WAS arrested… but nothing can undo the damage done to him as he was presented as a convict
you heard of DUKE.. how about HOFSTRA?
Danmell Ndonye lied about being gang raped in a Hofstra dormitory bathroom, causing four young non-white men ranging in age from 19 to 21 to be arrested by Nassau County police and held in custody for almost four days. Another young man, a high school senior, was about to be arrested at the time the false accuser recanted.
Their bail was set at $500,000 bond or $350,000 cash, effectively insuring they wouldn’t be freed until trial or until the charges were dropped. They each faced up to 25 years in prison if convicted. /
Newspaper reports treated the naked allegation as a proven rape, with scary lock-the-doors-and-hide-the-daughters headlines.
the student from Hofstra, was suspended and banned from campus
another was fired from his job…. death threads, families harrased, them abused in prison, and more
and WHY did the woman recant?
The only reason the false accuser recanted was because she learned that one of the young men had videotaped the sordid event. But even when it was revealed that the claim was a lie, progressive pundits insisted “we’ll never know what really happened” even though we did. Chivalrous men said the falsely accused men got the good scare they deserved. And feminists declared that the liar did not deserve to be branded as a criminal because “rape culture” made her do it.
remember TAWANA BRAWLEY? also about the same time as the texas case… she was supposedly gang raped by police who smeared her with feces. she got a rolex, and al sharpton got a career…
[edited for length by n-n]
GS
Good luck getting the left interested in justice. Their entire philosophy is based in injustice.
I’m sorry about what happened to you, Art.
To me, the scariest part of this case is it means the real murderer has been loose the entire time, and has likely killed again (and again).
I wish Mr. Morton the best and may he receive a huge payout from the state for his years of injustice.
michael morton should sue anyone individual being that helped get him arrested
The Jury system is broken. Most jurors do not have the mental capacity to understand technical or scientific evidence. We need a system in which jurists are made up of people who understand the crime that is being adjudicated.
How good to hear a great ending to a criminal act by the prosecutor. This is a liberal and conservative concern, we all want justice without political or financial gain.
I hope that charges can be brought against the former prosecutor and or staff. Truth cluttered in the midst of emotional turmoil created by intentional misrepresentation of fact may be a media delight. But it will always brings distortion, injustice and pain/suffering to the vulnerable innocent.