Tabitha Pollock was asleep when her boyfriend killed her 3-year-old daughter. Charged with first-degree murder because prosecutors believed she should have known of the danger, Pollock spent more than six years in prison before the Illinois Supreme Court threw out the conviction.
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This Washington Post article highlights one of the major flaws in the criminal justice system. When a defendant is sentenced, he or she is frequently asked show remorse and accept responsibility for their actions. However, when the State makes a mistake, it does not abide by its own requirements.
While Illinois has some kind of compensation for the wrongfully convicted (as dysfunctional as it is), only 22 states have any sort of provision. The remainder, including Idaho, have no statutory provisions to compensate the innocent. Not only is this situation an embarrassment, but it violates any sense of fairness. Instead of reinforcing confidence in the criminal justice system, the failure to recognize and correct the factors underlying wrongful convictions continues to undermine its legitimacy.
2 comments:
I agree whole-heartedly. The hypocrisy in this circumstance (and many others)provides good reason for people to not trust the system. Although, the Strain theory is not the only explanation; it is a legitimate one for the reaction to these situations. A system that was intentionally designed to not be like a dictatorship, is looking more and more like one. Although there are many to blame instead of just one; the end result is the same, the person without power gets victimized and those with power can continue to do so with no concern for repercussions. Until this changes and the law "becomes just" there is little reason for people to respect the system.
I recommend "The Tyranny of Good Intentions: How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice"
as a very good read on this topic. The author, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. A former government official and a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, he is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily.
Inside Flap Copy
A thousand years of legal protections against tyranny are being stolen right before our eyes. Under the guise of good intentions, personal liberties as old as the Magna Carta have become casualties in the wars being waged on pollution, drugs, white-collar crime, and all of the other real and imagined social ills. The result: innocent people caught up in a bureaucratic web that destroys lives and livelihoods; businesses shuttered because of victimless infractions; a justice system that values coerced pleas over the search for truth; bullying police agencies empowered to confiscate property without due process.
Here are some the reviews:
David Schoenbrod, professor, New York Law School
I went to law school to understand law's role in society, but was taught instead that government lawyers should run society from on high with little need to comply with time-honored rules designed to keep them honest and accountable to the society. Roberts and Stratton reveal the roots of the problem. How strange it is that I, a law professor, learned so much about the law from a book whose lead author is an economist.
Review
"A devastating indictment of our current system of justice and a call to arms to restore hard-earned protections of human freedom that are now routinely violated by government officials"
? Milton Friedman
"The Tyranny of Good Intentions is a bold defense of our fundamental freedoms. It demonstrates that government oppression is not a right-left issue, but rather a universal evil that should be resisted by all free people. It demonstrates why conservatives and liberals who despise tyranny must unite against statists of both the right and the left who falsely believe that partisan ends justify depravations of liberty. . . . When rights are subordinated to government power, the first steps toward tyranny are taken."
? Alan Dershowitz, author of The Genesis of Justice
"In The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Paul Craig Roberts and Lawrence Stratton combine writing talent with their genius for legal analysis to create a much-needed firewall against the current steady erosion of the rights of U.S. citizens."
? G. Gordon Liddy
"I went to law school to understand law's role in society, but was taught instead that government lawyers should run society from on high with little need to comply with time-honored rules designed to keep them honest and accountable to the society. Roberts and Stratton reveal the roots of the problem. How strange it is that I, a law professor, learned so much about the law from a book whose lead author is an economist."
? David Schoenbrod, professor, New York Law School
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