That’s not because they were tortured. It’s because the cops like to clean up their case files and speed things along, and they are often very good at getting people to say what they want to hear.
The 1960s folk singer Phil Ochs put it this way in a song:
But win, lose, or draw, it's the rule of the law
To always work for confession.
But why would someone confess to something they didn’t do? Well, what the modern young idealist needs to know is that many of the people railroaded by the system are not themselves saints.
We aren’t, for the most part, talking about people who have lived blameless lives. Many people remember the TV series “The Fugitive,” in which a good doctor is falsely convicted of murdering his wife.
Cases like that are few and far between. More of the falsely convicted are likely to be like the client an old public defender from Brooklyn told me about. “He isn’t guilty of what they are accusing him of, but he is still a scumbag,” he cheerfully told me. Most convicts are not, by and large, good poster children for any cause.
But if anyone has been convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, they deserve to be exonerated and released. They also should be compensated, if wrongly imprisoned.
Anything else is simply not fair. Now, there are bound to be a few problems, one of which is that this will cost money.
Michigan isn’t exactly rolling in dough these days. Plus, if DNA testing on demand becomes the norm, you know what will happen:
Virtually every prisoner who could conceivably be cleared by biological testing will demand it – no matter how guilty they are.
You never know, the convicts will reason. Why not roll the dice? They may have screwed up at the lab or lost the evidence.
In fact, police agencies have been known to mix up samples and lose evidence. But if they haven’t, and the result comes back positive again – well, what does the guy in jail for life have to lose?
These are things that have to be worked out. If a prisoner demanded what turned out to be a frivolous DNA test, I think it would be quite reasonable to make them pay the cost.
Yet what we need to remember is that our system always has put more value on freeing the innocent than on convicting the guilty.
Certainly the development of a test that can clear the falsely accused and falsely convicted is a great thing. And DNA testing may hold another silver lining for the law enforcement community:
It is bound to make police less apt to pin crimes on the usual suspects. There is such a thing as progress. It just sometimes comes when we least expect it.
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