In , newly tested DNA evidence proved their innocence. William Kelly pled guilty to third-degree murder for allegedly killing a year-old woman in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania.
He served two years in prison before DNA testing linked another man to the killing, as well as other murders, clearing Kelly. He was freed in Michael Marshall pled guilty in to stealing a truck in Georgia after he was identified by an eyewitness.
He was sentenced to ten years in prison, but was freed in December after DNA testing obtained by the Georgia Innocence Project proved his innocence and pointed to the identity of the real perpetrator. He testified against his co-defendant to avoid a possible death sentence, and served nearly 12 years in prison before DNA testing led to his exoneration — and also identified the real perpetrator in the case.
Ten months after his conviction, DNA testing proved his innocence and implicated the real perpetrator of the crime. Michael Phillips was the only suspect in the rape of a year-old white girl that occurred at the motel where he worked and lived. Philips, who is black, and was misidentified by the victim in a photo lineup, feared a jury would take her word over his and agreed to a plea bargain to avoid a lengthy prison sentence.
He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12 years in prison. After a jury convicted him of two crimes based on eyewitness misidentification, Phillips pled guilty to nine additional crimes to avoid what amounted to a life sentence. DNA testing finally led to his exoneration — and pointed to the identity of the real perpetrator — 25 years later. Rodney Roberts pleaded guilty to kidnapping after police said a rape victim picked Roberts out of a photo lineup.
He was sentenced to seven years in prison. In , the case was remanded back to court and the victim denied she picked any suspect out of a photo lineup. In , DNA testing was preformed which excluded Roberts from the crime. He was exonerated and released in March of Mandel Rogers was arrested in and charged in relation to three separate armed robberies and one armed robbery and sexual assault. In he was convicted of two of the charges and took a plea for the other two for a reduced sentence of 12 years.
Also a pleasure to be on a panel with my former colleague, professor Hessick and also with Judge Rakoff, who's written just a monumental book that I'm sure everyone wants to take a look at may not agree with everything in it, but certainly will learn a lot from reading it.
I have been a critic of some very excessive sentences. I had to impose a 55 year sentence on a low-level drug dealer, which I thought frankly, was a waste of taxpayer resources and, and an insult to victims of other very violent crimes that might see their offender go to prison for a much shorter period of time.
And I think Judge Rakoff's statistics are correct. Obviously he talks about the very high incarceration rates.
I do think, however, we do have to put a bit of context onto some of those numbers. One of the reasons we have such high incarceration rates in the United States is we have high victimization rates. So Judge Rakoff mentioned we have 2 million people a year going to prison.
We have, I think almost by an order of magnitude more, maybe 20 million, depending on what level of victimization you use victims of crime every year. So when you have high levels of victimization, it's not surprising to find --high levels of incarceration.
And I do think if we look at the trajectory of crime rates in America over the last 40 or 50 years we see that as incarceration rates fell in the s, crime rates went up. The response as Judge Rakoff points out in his book in the seventies, and particularly in the eighties was to increase incarceration.
And that does seem to have played a role in reducing crime. Although the extent to which it played that role is the subject of debate. I guess, one area where I think we need to be perhaps focusing even more resources is on policing.
Judge Rakoff was talking about why is it that we're not seeing a reduction in incarceration rates for young men who are African-American? I think one of the possible explanations for that is that we're seeing a particularly in the last six months or so a startling increase in crime rates in the inner city areas, such as the South and West Sides of Chicago.
And many of them are also young males. And so when you have high victimization rates, you are going to inevitably have high incarceration rates. And I think then the question is what can we do to fight the scourge of crime? Because if we fight the scourge of crime, then we won't have to of course incarcerate as many people,.
Jeffrey Rosen: [] Professor Hessick, your response to what you've heard Judge Rakoff and Judge Cassell suggest about the causes of mass incarceration and, and maybe focus on causes that you'd like to highlight and including perhaps the topic of your new, new book, Plea Bargaining ,.
How, how, if at all, does the plea bargaining system fit into the over-incarceration rates? Carissa Byrne Hessick: [] Sure. Thank you so much, Jeff.
And thank you for including me. It was an absolute joy to, to read Judge Rakoff's book. It's incredibly well-written and compelling, and I'm delighted to be on a panel with two men who I greatly admire including my former colleague, who I always enjoy listening to.
Even though we rarely agree. I do however, have to agree with him, that we can't ignore that incarceration is a response to crime. It's a response to crimes, some of which involve victims and some of which don't. And one of the questions we need to be asking ourselves is why is incarceration the first and sometimes the only tool that we use to address crime?
A number of people have written very persuasively about other approaches that would help to address the sort of victimization that Professor Cassell was mentioning, including increased social services spending other sorts of revitalizations in some of the neighborhoods where we see high crime rates. But instead, what we see is a rush to put people in prison. I'm in the middle of a big empirical project on state legislatures, and I can't tell you how often I read through testimony where somebody has committed a crime.
There's already a book, a law on the books dealing with that behavior. But the response of the legislature is to pass a new crime or to lengthen sentences. On some level, what we need to do is we need to recognize that just putting people in prison, isn't going to solve the problem of victimization. It's one response, but it's probably not the most effective. So why do we have so many people in prison?
We've gotten really good at that on some level, I should say. We've gotten very good at that. The system has been changed, so that's everyone expects when charges are filed, that there will be a conviction. Not that there'll be a trial or a jury, but that there will be a conviction. We used to have much higher trial rates in this country. And along with those higher trial rates were a significant number of acquittals. And I think that frankly made people uncomfortable.
And it was easy to argue that we needed broader laws or heavier sentences to avoid those sorts of acquittals and to get people to plead guilty. I don't think it's any accident that as the criminal trial rate bottomed out, so did the civil trial rate. I think Judge Rakoff captures this very well in his book that the justice system just isn't in the business of dispensing justice anymore.
It's in the business of processing cases, and those are very different things. And I think if you like efficiency, you might be able to defend what we have now, even though it's horribly inefficient in some ways, But if you care about reaching trying to figure out what actually happens and trying to figure out what's the best way to deal with the individuals involved, then the system we've set up in the United States right now, isn't the system that you're, that you're going to want.
Jeffrey Rosen: [] Wow. Powerfully said. Our criminal justice system is not about dispensing justice, but resolving cases. Judge Rakoff, you have a chapter. Your second chapter is Why Innocent People Plead Guilty, and you include, really stark statistics about plea bargaining, which I'll just share because when I learned them long ago in law school they surprised me, and I know they'll be striking for our friends who are watching.
What should our friends make of the fact that nearly all criminal cases do not go to trial, but instead settle with plea bargains and other means, and what, how does that affect why innocent people plead guilty? Jed Rakoff: [] So the common theme to this change is as these in my view, harsh laws were passed in reaction to rising crime in the 60s, 70s, 80s you see a direct correlation with the decrease in jury trials.
And the reason is clear the And so now with mandatory minimums and guidelines and career offenders, you're facing 20, 30, 40 years, even if you're relatively low level in say a big drug conspiracy. So what is a prudent defense counsel -- and I was a defense counsel for 15 years-- what do you do at that point?
You go and you plea bargain with the prosecutor and you say, look, my guy is really not that bad. He was at the low end. How about letting him plead to a lesser included offense or a superseding charge that will only have maybe five years mandatory imprisonment as opposed to 20 years.
And the notion that your client will turn that down just because in some cases he's innocent overlooks the risk that he is taking. And the risk he's prepared not to take. Here are some statistics that are even worse. I'm sorry to say than those in my book, these again are from this was I looked this up today. I'm actually I have a criminal trial going on.
So there is at least one jury trial left in the United States. But I took a few minutes to look this up. The Innocence Project, which has used DNA to exonerate now over people who were accused and found guilty of really serious crimes, murder, rape very serious crimes. But here's even worse. There's something called the national registry of exonerations.
And that covers all types of exonerations for the last 30 years or so. And that has now recorded 2, exonerations. I mean, this is staggering. These are people who are innocent, who are doing time in prison, which is no fun because they didn't want to risk having to face a much higher penalty if they were convicted at trial.
These are also people who often are very cynical about the legal system. Don't believe the system will exonerate them. But it's really more than anything, the risk that they want to avoid the risk of very long time that drives this unfortunate situation. That is, that's the gist of it. Jeffrey Rosen: [] Thank you very much for that. Judge Cassell Judge Rakoff just said, people plead guilty 'cause they're afraid, even though they're actually innocent, they may be wrongly convicted.
And yet you've recently published important articles arguing that the rate is actually lower than estimates when it comes to wrongful convictions. Your article, Overstating America's Wrongful Conviction Rate: Reassessing the Conventional Wisdom About the Prevalence of Wrongful Conviction talks about the growing body of academic literature, about the problem of wrongful convictions. And you also have contributed to a symposium about how often innocent people are actually convicted.
Tell us about the data and your conclusions on it. Paul Cassell: [] Let me, let me be clear. In each case of a wrongful conviction, of course, it's something that the system should work very, very hard to try to avoid, but there are trade-offs involved here, and I think that we need to put them into some sort of context. As Judge Rakoff mentioned, they're about 2 million people a year that go into custody. And if you go back as I think some of his statistics that he's just citing go back for, let's say 20 years, you're now looking at a pool of, let's say 40 million cases.
Now, can we find some cases in that pool of 40 million where innocent people have been convicted? Certainly we can, as he points out and others have pointed out, but what are, what are the lifetime risks here? I, it's obviously difficult to measure that precisely. There isn't a, a sheet somewhere that totes up exactly how many innocent people were convicted, but we can make reasonable estimates. And the articles that you just cited by me attempt to do that.
I come up with a figure of about a one out of , persons face a lifetime risk of being convicted wrongfully and sent to prison for a violent crime. And if you do the math, it turns out that you're about twice as likely to be struck by lightning in a given year, as you are to be wrongfully convicted and sent to prison for a violent crime.
So that's not to say we should get rid of lightning rods or that we should get rid of protections in our criminal justice system against convicting the innocent. But it is to say that we need to take account of the relative relative risks here. What can we do to reduce the risk of wrongful conviction? I, I certainly am in favor of that. Over the course of the campaign, The Innocence Network will be introducing several individuals and asking why they plead guilty, despite their innocence.
By bringing attention to the truth of guilty plea, the Innocence Network strives to promote conversation about a critical issue that can hopefully blossom into effective solutions.
Pyatt Monday, September 24, A common misconception in America is that the vast majority of people in prison have been proven guilty by the State. The next day, her judge scheduled a hearing to determine whether to set aside her plea. Does a criminal or civil defendant have to believe sincerely in her plea for it to stick in a court of law?
In a landmark case, North Carolina v. Alford , the defendant pleaded guilty to second-degree murder to avoid a trial on a first-degree murder charge—which carried a possible capital sentence. When entering his plea, the defendant claimed he was innocent of the crime but too afraid of the death penalty to risk a trial.
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