Politics and Dharma

It’s no secret that Texas criminal law has a heavy hand, and that innocent people are frequently sucked into the system by elected judges who want to appear ‘tuff on crime’. There’s been some house cleaning statewide, but especially in Dallas County since they got a new DA, Craig Watkins. I can’t find any reliable figures on this, as everyone gives a different value, but at least a dozen or two men from Texas prisons have been freed by DNA evidence. Grits for Breakfast, and other blogs, have been following this much more closely than has the local daily.

The Texas Innocence Project has been instrumental in doing much of the legal footwork to identify and verify innocents in the prison system. Last week, a man who died in prison in Lubbock was revealed to have been completely innocent the entire time, and today, another man in Dallas, Patrick Waller, was released after 15 years in prison, thanks to DNA evidence.

Scott Henson has been slamming eyewitness identification as being the primary cause of innocents being pulled into the system. He also suggests some evidence that the average person’s poor observation skills are being ‘helped along’ by police detectives eager to solve a case. In all, it appears painfully easy to put nearly anyone in jail on a murder charge merely on the say of some bad ‘eyewitnesses’ and an eager cop.

One of my standing arguments against the use of prisons is that innocent people sent to prison would more likely become thieves and murderers when they got out than otherwise. Unless they are appropriately funded and staffed, prisons are simply felony universities: any notion that anything like “rehabilitation” occurs without the appropriate funding is ludicrous. I know that if I were in such a situation, it would not do good things for my pysche. I’m pretty sure I’d have a hard time “playing the game” after having the rules played on me like that.

So who are these guys? (From J. Carlton’s AP article)

Four former inmates who collectively served nearly 100 years in prison before being exonerated lined the back wall of the crowded courtroom. The men freed by DNA testing in Dallas County have made a habit of showing up in court for exoneration hearings, and on Thursday they presented Waller with a prepaid cell phone as a gift.

These fellows went through all of this, and they became activists. The thing is, as poorly as Texas courts have apparently run in the last, oh, century, finding potential innocents in prisons has been like shooting fish in a barrel. Now there’s five men from Dallas County who were vindicated and will show up in court every time the State has to face another exoneration case. Soon, there will be six, then seven, then more.

Perhaps at some point, they will begin to appear — similarly attired, like a team of lawyers — at criminal trials in the State. Their presence alone might be a good message to the judge: You are being watched. Prosecution alone is not justice.