A long line of innocents on America's Death Row (Independent UK)

Mark Steel: A long line of innocents on America's Death Row
Perhaps this is what they mean by zero tolerance: not being tolerant of people who've done zero

Published: 28 March 2007

Sometimes you think: "This time the Americans really have got the right person and he's banged to rights". It was like that when they announced Sheik Mohammed, who'd been enjoying his convalescence in Guantanamo Bay, had made a confession. But then out came the hilarious account of how he'd personally planned every explosion from Kracatoa onwards. Soon they'll announce there's an appendix that goes "Paragraph 785. I readily confess that I conspired to perpetrate the act of hijacking a Boeing 747 to fly it into Bob Woolmer."

But the traditional approach to law and order associated with America is facing a challenge, ironically, in Texas. Because Craig Watkins, a black defence lawyer, has won the election for district attorney in Dallas, and he's handed over 354 cases of long-term prisoners who've requested a DNA test to an organisation called The Innocence Project, which will check whether or not these convicts really are guilty.

The project has already disproved 13 convictions, in which almost every case looks spookily similar. The convicts are young, black, from somewhere in the area, and there's no evidence except an uncertain identification. The prosecution statements must have been "Members of the jury, bear in mind we have incontrovertible evidence that on the night of the crime this man before you was in existence. Are we to believe this is mere coincidence?"

Although DNA testing has been available, the courts have refused it. Even in medieval trials they took the trouble to find some evidence, but the Texan system would have found that too liberal. They'd have complained: "Whadda we doin' waysten' tarm an' money on a duckin' stool for, hell you can see the bitch is a witch."
....snip....

There doesn't seem to be much logic, even for the Texan law and order lobby, in screaming for the wrong people to be kept in jail, especially as this means the real murderers and rapists are still at liberty. But it does suit them. It is the attitude of the columnist who wrote, on the release of the men wrongly convicted of killing Carl Bridgewater, "Why should we care about these low-lifes? Even if they didn't do that crime, if they'd been free they would have done others"

Because low-lifes, or, in America, young poor blacks, are all the same, so it doesn't really matter if the wrong one's jailed, as long as one of them is. Maybe we should have the same attitude to all crimes: as we never caught Lord Lucan, arrest Lord Hutton instead, as they're all pretty much the same.

But in Dallas, assumed to be the the most unassailably yeehah heart of President George Bush's America, people have voted for this confrontation for all he stands for. Who knows what weapons Bush's supporters will use to fight back. Maybe they will soon have nothing left, except to get the election of any liberal in Texas declared null and void by the International Board for the Maintenance of Regional Stereotypes. ......

The complete piece is at: http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_m_z/mark_steel/article2398861.ece

there is corruption. We watch as poor people are sent to the gallows, and the O.J.'s walk away. There is no justice when there is no balance.