Police brutality is most commonly thought of as a physical act of violence against an individual — be it a beating administered via fist, boot, or nightstick; placing handcuffs on a suspect so tightly circulation is cut off; Tazering; shooting; and the ultimate, killing — but there is another form of “violence” that (with the exception of someone being killed) can have a more lasting and devastating effect: The “violence” of being railroaded into prison.
No one can really imagine what its like to have their liberty taken away via false and/or rigged testimony. Surprisingly, this type of “violence” is visited upon hapless individuals (usually poor, black, or both) far more often than most folks imagine.
Sir William Blackstone, the eighteenth century English jurist who, in 1766, published the four-volume treatise, Commentaries on the Laws of England, (which still underpins much of our modern jurisprudence here in America) is credited with coining the expression: “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.”
However, over the years, overzealous police and prosecutors have turned Blackstone’s maxim on its head as they ruthlessly contribute to the collapse of America’s criminal justice system by utilizing underhanded (and sometimes downright illegal) tactics to win convictions at any and all costs. In virtually all court jurisdictions across America the number of convictions take supremacy over the dispensing of justice, which often leads police and prosecutors to use the law as a cudgel … to bludgeon sometimes-innocent individuals into submission, often into guilty pleas, and then off to prison.
These soulless functionaries of the state take away individuals’ freedom simply to increase their “stats,” their conviction rates, so they look good at election or promotion time. For far too many of them it’s not about the quality of justice or the seeking out of the truth, but more about the quantity — how many people can they ship off to prison, innocence be damned.
When Thomas Haynesworth, a Virginia man who spent 27 years behind bars for a rape he did not commit, first attempted to present to the court new DNA evidence that would eventually clear him, then-Virginia Attorney General Mary Sue Terry famously said in open court, “Evidence of innocence is irrelevant.” Indeed, she actually said that.
The National Registry of Exonerations is a joint project of the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law that together have provided detailed information about known exonerations in the United States since 1989. There are presently 1,204 cases listed on the registry, and an additional 1,170 other cases were identified but are not included in the count because of technical reasons. Estimates of the number of wrongfully convicted prisoners serving sentences in the U.S. vary between 7 and 25 percent … numbers we should not be willing to tolerate, but we do since we are comfortable in the fact railroading only happens to the “other” guy.
And the biggest tool in the police bag of tricks for convicting the innocent is manipulation of “eyewitness testimony,” which is virtually sacrosanct in courtroom criminal proceedings, in spite of the fact it’s been know for years how often such testimony is inaccurate and unreliable. As former Ohio attorney general Jim Petro explains in his book False Justice: Eight Myths that Convict the Innocent, cops use dirty tricks to convince witnesses to identify individuals they only suspect of a committing a crime. However, in many cases, false testimony proves it.
Here’s how it works in some cases: Crime victims are shown photo lineups of five or six potential perpetrators by cops, including a photo of the suspect they already have their minds made up about. If the victim cannot identify the suspect they want, they come back again the next day with another lineup of photos. However, the person they have their sights zeroed in on is again included. So when the cops ask “do any of these photos look familiar?” of course the victim is going to say “yes” and point to the picture of the person they saw the day before in the lineup.
“Bingo!” The cops have their perpetrator identified and often will hide any evidence they uncover that goes contrary to the theory of their case. This is exactly what happened to Anthony Green, who served 13 years for a rape he didn’t commit. However, since the crime took place on the Campus of Cleveland Clinic, cops were eager to pin the crime on somebody — anybody — very quickly so as to protect the vaunted reputation of the medical facility.
The victim told the cops the rapist said his name was Tony, so they went back through employment records and the first person they found who no longer worked at the Clinic named Anthony was it. In spite of the fact Green never used the name Tony (a fact the cops ascertained) he was it. They made all of the other facts fit their suspicions. Case closed.
Current Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Tim McGinty was the assistant prosecutor on the case, and the man the cops fed the false information to. He, however, did apologize to Green after he got out of prison; the cops, they never, ever apologize.
Why? Because the only thing they’re really sorry about is the fact their bullshit case eventually fell apart, and, in truth, they’d do it over again and again in a heartbeat if given the opportunity. Yes, this still goes on today. And we call this “justice” in America?
[Photo: Rennett Stowe]
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.