The DA Says He's Innocent. He Might Spend Life in Prison Anyway

The "justice" system was optimized for stuff like this. At least in the history of the US, police started as private task forces for elite to lock up striking workers and other protestors that might be a threat to their private property. In the South they started as groups to capture runaway slaves. After the Civil War the image of the Black person was transformed from effeminate and stupid to strong scary criminal. The South fought very hard to add "except as punishment for crime" to the 14th amendment which otherwise outlawed slavery. And their campaign to criminalize Black people began immediately as an attempt to recreate slavery. That's when jails really took off and that's the context under which much of our justice system developed. It was literally optimized to throw people in prison for made up charges.

Nowadays (most of us) have different expectations from our justice system but we've yet to really update the processes

Here in Norway they've created an independent commission[1] to handle these cases of grave injustice.

Not perfect, they can't handle many cases at once and have perhaps been a bit too cautious (to be charitable), but certainly better than nothing.

[1]: https://www.gjenopptakelse.no/en/

> Is there any meaningful progress being made to reassess our preference for finality over justice?

I think the problem is that, despite a prisoner's constitutional right to habeus corpus, once you are convicted you no longer have the presumption of innocence.

Add to the fact that the convicted was convicted by a jury of their peers. Therefore, to overturn the conviction, the courts not only have to recognized and acknowledge their own error, they need to overturn the jury's decision. And the system places such a high value on jury decisions that it doesn't treat overturning them lightly.

This means that there is a huge uphill battle to climb. The presumption is that you are guilty, because you were convicted beyond a shadow of a reasonable doubt. You are no longer in a position of defending against a prosecutor's case where they need to prove you guilty and you have no burden of proof what-so-ever. You are now in a position where you need to prove your innocence.

I'm not sure what the process is like when there is exculpatory evidence. I would hope that as long as the evidence has the slightest hint of merit that the case can be reopened. In the case of the article, however, (which I will readily admit that I didn't study in its entirety since it was pretty TL;DR, so I skimmed and skipped parts) it doesn't sound like there is new exculpatory evidence, it sounds like the DA is unconvinced by the evidence and that if the trial were to occur today, that evidence would have been given much stricter scrutiny than it was at the time. It sounds like we need better ways to rexamine cases when standards of evidence change. To offer a made-up hypothetical, imagine that polygraph tests were admissible at one point and then it was deemed they are unreliable and are no longer admissible, could people who were convicted on polygraph evidence demand an appeal on that ground? I'm not a lawyer so I don't know, but I would hope so.

It's really what pardons are for. It would "only" take a cultural change for DAs to feed up and combine together each year a "master list" of routine pardons that would be "rubber stamped" at both the federal and state levels, depending on the jurisdiction the person was convicted in.

This is what corruption looks like, power for the wrong reasons. Jails will make a profit, and charge inmates for the burden of making a phone call (during a time where literally every adult carries a device that can make infinite calls for no additional cost), but somehow preventing inmates from hurting each other is beyond their power.

I'm wondering the same thing, these stories need told!

I literally am good friends today with a guy who was wrongly convicted of exactly the same thing, around the same time, in a different state, who served 20 years before the Innocence Project was successful in getting him exonerated.

That we, as a society, allow this shit to go on is just mind-bending.