One-sided investigations, faulty eyewitness identifications and/or questionable prosecutorial conduct are behind most wrongful convictions
Randolph Arledge, 58, was freed from a Texas prison Monday after DNA tests showed he was wrongly convicted of the 1984 stabbing death of a woman. He had been sentenced to serve 99 years, but spent the first part of his sentence in Tennessee for an unrelated armed robbery conviction until he was paroled in 1998.
Arledge became the 118th person in Texas state courts to have his conviction overturned, according to the University of Michigan's national registry of exonerations. That’s not something for us Texans to brag about.
I started my law enforcement career in Texas following WWII, but it wasn’t until 1958, when as a new California cop I was taught that criminal investigators and prosecutors should work just as hard to find evidence which might exonerate a suspect as to uncover evidence that he committed the crime.
The problem is that in crimes like murder, which get a lot of public attention, investigators are under a great deal of pressure to solve those crimes quickly and prosecutors are under pressure to obtain convictions. And then you also have prosecutors who play loose with the rules in order to obtain those convictions.
I must admit that I rarely ever tried to find any exonerating evidence once I zeroed in on a suspect where there was strong evidence he committed the crime I was investigating. Would there have been any evidence that he was not the guilty party? Possibly. Were any of the suspects I investigated actually innocent but nevertheless convicted? I really do not thinks so, but to be honest, I cannot say for sure.
When I was a criminal justice professor, Criminal Investigation was one of the courses I regularly taught. I always emphasized to my students that in investigating any crime, they should work just as hard to find evidence which might exonerate a suspect as to uncover evidence that he committed the crime. But I’m sure that my students who became law enforcement officers ended up just like me by failing to look for that exonerating evidence.
No comments:
Post a Comment