The people vote these laws in thinking it will help lower crime when all it does is vilify, fine and enslave the middle and lower classes AT RANDOM!

If they even think you did a crime, they drag you into court in shackles, put on a show, lock you away, fine you into slavery and stamp you with “guilty”, ruining any possibility of landing a good job for the REST OF YOUR LIFE!

And the best thing we’ve done about it was a few aimless occupy protests that were forgotten in less than a month!

You think it wont happen to you and you may be right, but let me ask you:
Can you afford $1500 for going 3MPH over the speeding limit because somebody needed to fill a quota?
$500 for gum on the sidewalk that isn’t even yours? $10,000 for a dinged Mercedes that you didn’t even cause?

You think I’m being unreasonable? You think it never happens? Would you gamble $12,000 on it?

Weare family of Steven Nowicki, thanks for your support. How do you know about Steven’s imprisonment? Are you from NYS or read about it elsewhere, we would just to know how far this story has gone around the states, so that people could know what a travesty this is.HE IS GUILTY OF NOTHING EXCEPT BEING A KIND AND WONDERFUL PERSON, Thank you again

http://mikeb302000.blogspot.com/2009/02/dna-testing-exonerates-dead-man.html

I like your suggestions about how to protect the innocent. Still, I’m a little mystified by your remark that “we need to make convicting the innocent the exception rather than the norm.”

Convicting the innocent already IS the exception rather than the rule. Repeated studies by various Innocence Projects, that explicitly aim to identify all cases of wrongful acquittals, invariably report that about 97-99% of all the convictions at trial that they evaluate are convictions of the guilty. (Throw in the fact that 90%+ of all convictions emerge from plea bargains –where the rate of false conviction hovers around 0.2%–and it’s clear that almost all those convicted of a crime are guilty.)

Can you think of any other comparable, complex human activity where we make mistakes as rarely as 1-3% of the time? Let alone only 0.2% of the time? Surgeons botch operations at a higher rate than that. The FDA approves drugs as safe as long as they are 95% sure of their safety, meaning that about 5% of approved drugs are unsafe.

Another problem faced by innocent defendants, particularly in the context of gang or organized crime prosecutions where guilty by association is often inferred, is that innocent defendants are rarely in a position to mitigate their sentences or drive favorable bargains by cooperating to implicate others.

As an aside, the case Kay Sieverding is referring to is one involving unauthorized practice of law in termination of parenting rights cases, where courts found that she had crossed the line from being a lay supporter of defendants to being a de facto lawyer.

This is pure, unthinking sentimentalism. No one, I repeat no one, knows how to design a justice system that never convicts the innocent. And have you thought for a moment about what life would be like if, following your advice, we acquitted all the guilty?

There is a way to design a justice system that at least has some safeguards so that convicting the innocent becomes the exception as opposed to the norm. For instance:

1. Confessions should be either written out and signed by the accused, or preferably tape recorded or video recorded.

2. Any information supplied by an informant should be thoroughly investigated and corroborated before taking it as the truth.

3. Hearsay evidence should not be permitted.

4. The informant should be mandated to testify and submit to cross-examination, regardless of whether he or she changed their testimony.

5. En Banc hearings should be automatic anytime an appellate panel deviates from case law.

6. All appellate briefs must accurately report the facts of the case as supported by the record; any facts or conclusions not supported by the record should be stricken and should not be considered by the panel.

7. Overcharging should not be allowed, i.e., if a person is accused of delivering drugs and there is no evidence of a conspiracy, that person should not be charged with a conspiracy. In fact, no crime should be charged to a person if evidence of that crime and that person’s commission of the crime does not exist.

I’m not an attorney. I’m sure an attorney would have even more suggestions.

“A criminal justice system that is capable of ever imprisoning an innocent person is unacceptable. I would rather every single guilty person walk free than ever have an innocent punished.”

This is pure, unthinking sentimentalism. No one, I repeat no one, knows how to design a justice system that never convicts the innocent. And have you thought for a moment about what life would be like if, following your advice, we acquitted all the guilty?

You seem to forget that we punish the probably guilty because, if we don’t, vast numbers of innocent persons will be victimized by the unconvicted felons who, if you had your way, would be free because we wanted to run no risk of convicting an innocent man.

Finally, I wonder why you worry exclusively about the few innocent who are falsely convicted but seem not to be moved by the hundreds of thousands of innocent people who would suffer if we suddenly opened the doors of all our jails and prisons? An innocent person killed or raped by someone who was falsely acquitted deserves your compassion as much as the innocent person who is wrongly convicted does.

What happened is that Judge Naughty Nottingham extorted me and my husband. He dismissed my complaint in the D of CO 02-1950 but didn’t say why. I filed claims based on related facts in another court. Nottingham ordered me imprisoned for doing so. According to the Steamboat Springs City attorney, see city council minutes 9/06/05: “Mr. Lettunich reported his work on the following. The Federal District Court held a contempt hearing regarding Kay Sieverding. She refused to dismiss the cases that she filed and was arrested. Mr. Sieverding dismissed the cases but later reneged and said he will not dismiss the cases; so he may be arrested as well.”

Nottingham successfully extorted my husband by saying:

“you will file on your behalf a motion to voluntarily dismiss…If you fail to withdraw those lawsuits, the next time you’re in this court you better be prepared with your toothbrush, because you will be going to jail.”

I filed another lawsuit while I was in jail but Christopher Beall of Faegre & Benson threatened to have Judge Naughty put my husband in jail if I didn’t file a motion to dismiss.

Emma: You could try contacting the Innocence Project and seeing if you can get records of people who were released thru post judgment motions. Then you could look for similar facts with your son. If you write it up you might be able to sell a kidney to pay for a lawyer.

As for the gentleman who thinks that innocent are found guilty in only 3% of the cases, that is not true in the 7th circuit.

My son was accused by a convicted felon of supplying him with 2 kilos of cocaine on December 15, 1998. It was found that it was impossible because 5 witnesses came forth, including two Chicago police officers (my son was present in my home because of an earlier burglary) to say that he was at my home which is 13 miles away from where he was supposed to be delivering drugs.

The jury found him NOT GUILTY. However,he was also indicted for conspiracy, and the act in furtherance of the conspiracy was supplying the drug dealer with 2 kilos of cocaine on December 15, 1998. There were no co-conspirators, no co-defendants, no witnesses, no physical evidence, no surveillance, only the agent’s word that he had confessed to the2 kilo delivery (which he was acquitted of) in post-arrest statements. The informant lied so much and changed his story so much (and it ultimately differed too much from my son’s alleged “confession”) that the government would not allow him to testify at trial. Instead they used his out-of-court statements brought in through the agents & the appellate court said that the hearsay issue was not error because the statements were not brought in for the truth (the statement was that he was the informant’s supplier). The judge refused to give an instruction that the accused cannot conspire with a government informant. The appellate court said that should have been given, but it was harmless error because the jury must have thought that they conspired sometime before that date. The informant was given a superseding indictment which dropped my son’s name as a co-conspirator, but that was never mentioned in court. The agents were unable to produce any rough notes of the so-called confession. The appellate attorney stated that the uncorroborated & undocumented statements are not enough to convict, but the Assistant U.S. Attorney said he had a conversation with the informant about a $40,000 debt. There was no record or evidence of such a conversation but the AUSA said he had a right to infer that such a conversation might have taken place based on the uncorroborated hearsay statement of the agent that such a debt existed. So the appellate panel affirmed based on that “evidence.” The original indictment was for 2 kilos (for which he was acquitted). The government presented a special verdict for 5 kilos. The judge said he did not see any drugs, so he could only depend on the 2 kilos and although he couldn’t see the additional 3 kilos, he oould understand why the jury would think there were 5 kilos, which equal 10 years to life.

The judge denied the 2255 and the COA and in the 7th circuit, you have to go back to the same panel that affirmed the conviction and ask them to issue a COA. My son had no criminal record. He is a husband & father of 5, doesn’t smoke nor drink, grew up in a middle class home, went to college, was a licensed journeyman carpenter and did websites on the side. To apply for clemency he would have to admit to a crime he did not commit and express remorse for it. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how an innocent man can prove his innocence in the federal justice system?

The Duke rape case was an aberration…not in the conduct of the prosecutor, but in the fact that he suffered consequences for his conduct.

We recently had a case here in Chesapeake VA (Google Ryan Frederick) where the Prosecutor demonstrably lied to the judge (insisted that there were no stills taken during a re-enactment at the crime scene to be turned over to the defense during discovery, when a video at the scene (a video that the prosecution tried, and failed, to prevent the court or the defense from viewing) clearly shows the official police photographer moving the very same prosecutor around so they could get a shot). The Prosecutor received no censure at all (but the prosecution was required to turn the photos that they denied ever existed over to the defense…during the actual trial…not during the discovery phase when the defense may have actually had time to get an expert to view and evaluate them).

Until we start holding government officials personally responsible for misconduct (and I mean treat it SEVERELY), miscarriages of justice like this will not abate.

These are acts of terrorism and have no relationship to real justice.

Take a very typical corruption prosecution. Cops catch guy who is guilty of corruption. They offer him a deal: be punished for your crimes, or turn state’s evidence against some bigger fish and we’ll let you off.

Lather, rinse, repeat…

Eventually, you get to a key and pivotal suspect: the guy who is guilty, but doesn’t know any guilty person who is a bigger fish than himself. This guilty person faces a choice: being punished for his crimes, or committing perjury and framing an innocent person.

Suppose he chooses the perjury… Then he puts an innocent party in the position of having the choice between taking a punishment that he does not deserve, or committing perjury and framing another innocent.

When you run this gambit, you get a straight line of suspects who cooperate, ended by the one who refuses to cooperate and gets, at the very least, prosecuted for some crime. (Even if not convicted, being prosecuted is obviously a negative event.)

The interesting question is this: which is more likely? That a guilty person somewhere up the line will refuse to turn state’s evidence and face the full weight of the law? Or that prosecutors will run through all of the guilty people and even a couple of innocent* ones before they find an innocent with the moral fortitude to bear the full weight of an unjust prosecution without trying to deflect it onto someone else?

*These would be the ones who were innocent before the prosecutors successfully suborned perjury from them.

No. “Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer” is a famous saying for a reason. It is Blackstone’s formulation and read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_formulation

I would rather be Reasonable for my own life and take my chances with the criminals-at-large than face prison for, literally, doing nothing. As for the guilty let loose? They either clean up (not justice, but they are no longer threats to society) or get caught eventually; especially as more people start standing up for themselves and fighting back.