FTA:Judge Rakoff reckons that from 2 to 8 percent of defendants are innocent. On the basis of my observations, as someone who was wrongly convicted and imprisoned, though the Supreme Court ultimately vacated my four convictions (four having been abandoned and nine rejected by jurors), the number is probably 10 to 15 percent, but if we take 6 percent, that means that there are 150,000 innocent people today in American prisons and jails, and that nearly 3 million of the United States’ 48 million ostensible felons are innocent. At the end of his piece, the judge proposes the involvement of judges in the plea-bargain process, which he admits is “not a panacea,” but which he puts forth as a palliative to the “shame of sending innocent people to prison.” The mountain of corruption and hypocrisy gives birth to a mouse of reform. The judge does not refer to any other infamous aspects of this terribly corrupt and abusive system, such as the practices of presenting false affidavits ex parte, in camera proceedings to magistrates who are rubber stamps for the prosecutors, and claiming that the means with which a defendant intended to pay his counsel were “ill-gotten gains” and having them frozen to deprive the accused of effective means of self-defense (in so far as such a possibility exists). This happened to me, but my assets are largely in Canada and the United Kingdom, I am not an American citizen or resident, and those countries refused to hear of any such Star Chamber asset-freeze proceeding. A friend of mine who is a nationally recognized authority on the vagaries of the American criminal-justice system wrote of the Rakoff piece: “Would that Rakoff would go one step farther and conclude his piece with a paragraph like this: ‘And so, with the interests of true justice in mind, I announce that henceforth I will not play this game that is characterized by coerced testimony (cooperation) that is of dubious credibility. I will not take prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations. I will dismiss indictments that are brought in order to bring pressure on an individual to cooperate by giving testimony pleasing to the government, or to punish said individual for refusing to cooperate, and I will state, in written opinions, my reasons for dismissing those indictments. Since I consider the entire system described in my NYRoB article to be unconstitutional as well as immoral and unethical, I will simply bow out of the game and allow the appellate courts, whose members know full well what I have written is true, to reverse me if they want to see a corrupt game continue.’” h/t:Instapundit
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 15:24:54 +0000
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