oh dear, now i'm going to eat you alive

so, pissant number 5,459,776 (known to like-minds as joshua marquis, district attorney of clatsop county in oregon) has decided to open his rotting hell-brain and let this drivel spill out:

Guest column: Innocents languishing on Death Row? A myth

watch me wipe the floor with a district attorney.

Americans love the underdog. Thousands of law students aspire to be Atticus Finch, the famous fictional lawyer from To Kill A Mockingbird.

oh.

my.

god.

this is so far from the truth it's making me convulse. as far as "underdogs" go, i'd say the ultimate group of people to fit this description would be minorities, no? so let's say america is full of atticus finches. let's just fucking pretend for three seconds. everyone's out to save the underdog. would 59 percent of the currently incarcerated be minorities? statistics show that more than one-fourth of all black males and 16 percent of Latinos can expect to spend time in prison during their lifetime, while only 4 percent of white males ever go to prison.

yeah, sounds like america is full of atticus finches. bullshit. no, i'll tell you what the american law student strives for more often than not. CASH. that's why men like OJ simpson still roam the streets, but innocents like izzy zimmerman, and all 174 of these guys get locked up for decades. no money, shit lawyers.

To start, only 14 Americans who were once on death row have been exonerated by DNA evidence alone. The hordes of Americans wrongfully convicted exist primarily on Planet Hollywood.

nice try. classic, although poor, attempt at overshadowing the main point, and that is that whether or not DNA was involved, or the sole determining factor in the exoneration of anyone, hundreds of people have been exonerated from all different types of sentences, including death. again, i refer you to the innocence project.

In the Winter 2005 Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, a group led by Samuel Gross, a law professor at the University of Michigan, published an exhaustive study of exonerations around the country from 1989 to 2003 in cases ranging from robbery to capital murder. They were able to document only 340 inmates who were eventually freed.

only? bet you'd think about that number twice if you were one of those guys. but you're not. cause you have money. and the blessed skin color, you pasty bitch.

in my opinion, any system that allows a single innocent man to spend time incarcerated, is an inneffective, broken system.

(They counted cases where defendants were retried after an initial conviction and subsequently found not guilty as exonerations.)

let's check out the definition of "exoneration":

1 (esp. of an official body) absolve (someone) from blame for a fault or wrongdoing, esp. after due consideration of the case.

wouldn't cases where defendants were retried after an initial conviction and subsequently found not guilty be the definition of an exoneration?

So, lets give the professor the benefit of the doubt: Lets assume that he understated the number of innocents by roughly a factor of 10, that instead of 340 there were 4,000 people in prison who werent involved in the crime in any way. During that same 15 years, there were more than 15 million felony convictions across the country. That would make the error rate 0.027 percent or, to put it another way, a success rate of 99.973 percent.

a-ha! an admission! there ARE errors! which makes the system a cold-blooded killer. i wonder what it would feel like to be that 0.027 percent. there was this one guy who was drafted by the oakland athletics and was about to start training camp, when he was picked up on murder charges, convicted on controversial evidence and sentenced to death. 11 years later he was exonerated. the A's didn't want him anymore. that'd kinda suck don't you think? or how about all those men who didn't get to watch their kids grow up? how many of the suicides in prison are related to actual innocence? how many of the executed were innocent prior to DNA testing? the loss of a baseball career, the loss of fatherhood, the loss of lives is ok because it's only 0.027 percent of the time? what kind of sick fuck is this guy?

we have an entire appeals court system intended to intervene in those few cases where the innocent are in jeopardy.

if an innocent man has to go through the slow and arduous appeals process, the system ain't workin'. innocent men should not be convicted. period. THAT is a perfect system.

Americans should be far more worried about the wrongfully freed than the wrongfully convicted.

so americans shouldn't be worried that one day it could happen to them? that they could be taken from their families, homes, and careers to serve time and possibly be executed? that's bloody absurd.

and the truly scary part:

Joshua Marquis is the district attorney of Clatsop County and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association.

posted by Courtney at 10:54 a.m.

Sick of paying so much for calls from prison? Click here, DO Something