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Judicial errors take high toll on inmates, taxpayers, report says
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco's leading newspaper)
Posted: March 14th, 2016
http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Judicial-errors-take-hig...
692 felony convictions in California ... were thrown out between 1989 and 2012 based on errors or misconduct by police, prosecutors, defense lawyers or judges, according to a new study by researchers at UC Berkeley and the University of Pennsylvania. The report ... didnt include misdemeanor cases, which amount to about 80 percent of all prosecutions, or juvenile cases. And it also excluded the costs of jailing people who were later released without charges, which may amount to $70 million a year, the report said. The study examined only records from California and ... looked at cases in which felony convictions were overturned and the defendants were later cleared. More than half the cases involved prosecutors wrongful withholding of evidence. One example was that of former Black Panther Elmer Geronimo Pratt. Pratt was convicted in 1972 of murdering schoolteacher Carolyn Olson [in 1968] and was sentenced to life in prison, based in part on [witness] testimony. He was freed in 1999 after a judge found that prosecutors had withheld evidence that the witness was an informant for the FBI, which was then trying to discredit Pratt as part of its Cointelpro campaign. The authors questioned long-standing laws that shield prosecutors from lawsuits by criminal defendants. They said they knew of no other profession that received immunity for intentional wrongdoing that gravely injures another.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the prison system.
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