Monday Evening Margarita
Posted on
May 05, 2008 by
Gideon
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Happy Cinco de Mayo folks! Hope you all treated yourself to a cerveza today. If not, just ogle the picture in this post.
Here’s what you missed while boozin’ it up in honor of the 5th of May:
- Norm takes umbrage at defendant’s tactics of throwing his client - New Haven detective Clarence Willoughby - under the bus.
- Scott once again lambasts former Judge Cassell for his approval of a curious article that concludes blacks receive longer sentences because they are, well, more prone to committing crimes. Be warned, some seemingly racist commenters have crawled out of the woodwork.
- What’s the best defense for the guy that tried to cash a check for $360 billion.
- A survival guide to legal blogs and blogging, from Bag and Baggage. She’s right - that cover is fantastic.
- Crime and Consequences is miffed by “us” when we “blur the line between an inability to reprosecute and actual proof of innocence”. Uh, okay.
- Carolyn Elefant reminds us to stop naysaying.
- An explosion rattled the San Diego Federal Courthouse early yesterday morning.
- From LBW, man asks court to change his name to “In God We Trust”.
- SL & P brings us the story of how fiscal pressures are leading states to release inmates early.
- Volokh tries to make sense of this L.A. Times article about twisting DNA statistics.
- An update on Tim Masters.
- The WSJ Law Blog asks if lawyers blogging about cases is a good thing or a bad thing.
- CDW’s weekly roundup is here.
- The Top 11 Jesus sightings.
- The Windypundit has yet another idea to reform the criminal justice system: make juries rule on Motions.
- Mark Bennett hands out the first Asshat of the Day Award (ADA).
- Alltop.com launched its Law section, compiling posts from the top blawgs.
Don’t overdo it! It’s only Monday, after all.
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I think the folks at Crime & Consequences would like to see some honesty in this “exoneration” stuff. There is a difference between a Kirk Bloodworth and a Jeremy Sheets. That abolitionists refuse to acknowledge the point shows a good deal of intellectual dishonesty.
But in the context of the burden of proof and the criminal justice system, isn’t “exonerated” correct? There wasn’t enough evidence to convict. The criminal justice system isn’t concerned with innocence - it is concerned with guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
The problem, Gideon, I think is shown if you do a little thought experiment. Let’s say that Jeremy Sheets was never let off death row and was executed for the crime for which he was convicted. The system, at least under the DPIC’s manner of evaluating it, would be better, as there would be one less “exoneration”. So, in essence, the system’s procedural liberality is used against it.
Relatedly, the “exoneration” list really is mixing apples and oranges. There is a fact of life–sometimes people get away with murder. This would be a “false negative”. And there are certainly “false negatives” in the 128 “exonerees”. How fair is it to indict a system with numbers that include those false negatives? The answer is that it is not.
In the context of the criminal justice system, “exonerated” may well be correct, but when we evaluate criminal justice policies, we have to judge them in a larger context.
That we follow the procedures and standards of our system of justice because we believe they produce a good overall result—justice, one hopes—doesn’t mean that letting guilty people go free isn’t still a bad thing.
That factual guilt or innocence is often unknowable doesn’t make it less important—just less certain. So, as a datapoint for analysis of policy, proof of factual innocence is stronger evidence than is destruction of supposed proof of factual guilt.