Worth reading: a New Yorker story about a guy named Edward Garry who was convicted of killing a retired NYPD detective.
Some excerpts:
The murder of a former cop electrified the Forty-seventh Precinct. The next morning, phones rang constantly as Potter’s former colleagues called in for updates. The N.Y.P.D. threw all its resources behind the investigation, putting some forty officers, including Forcelli, on the case. (For most murders, two was the norm.)
Eyewitnesses’ descriptions of the perpetrators varied: two male Hispanics; two male Hispanics and a woman with bleached-blond hair; two male Hispanics and a black male; four male Hispanics; two black males. Descriptions of the getaway car included a dark-blue Oldsmobile Delta 88, a black van, a light-blue four-door, and a black Ford Escort hatchback.
At around sixteen, [Edward Garry] dropped out of high school, joined a gang, and began selling drugs to pay for Dr. Martens and nights at Manhattan clubs. He was arrested a few times and spent a year on Rikers Island. Because of these arrests, Garry’s mug shot was in police files, and it was among those shown to Vargas and Garcia because Garry matched their descriptions of a Hispanic man (his mother is Puerto Rican).
Garcia and Vargas both picked him again. The officers were relieved to have solved a high-profile case so quickly, though they didn’t have a confession, any physical evidence connecting Garry to the crime, or any information placing him near Irene’s the night of the murder. “Back then, identification was like the gold standard,” Forcelli told me. “If you could get a non-crackhead, non-prostitute witness to I.D., it’s, like, whoa.”
The jury found Garry guilty of second-degree murder, and he received a sentence of twenty-five years to life.
Forcelli had begun to have serious doubts about the work he was doing at the N.Y.P.D. He hated having to abandon an investigation the moment an arrest was made. “A lot of facts come out after the arrest,” he told me. He preferred the methods of federal agents, who didn’t consider their cases closed until pleas were entered or trials took place, and applied to join the A.T.F.
[about another case] He alerted the prosecutors, and was shocked to find them uninterested. “We’re telling the Bronx D.A.’s office this, and it’s ‘Too fucking bad,’ ” he said. He interviewed Glynn, who was in prison for another crime, and succeeded in getting him to admit that he was the killer. He arrested him on the spot—an unorthodox move, given that prosecutors were planning to put another man on trial. As a result of Forcelli’s action, prosecutors dropped the case against Little, but Forcelli was outraged at the carelessness with which the case had been handled. A simple records search showed that an eyewitness who had given crucial testimony against Little had been in prison at the time of the murder. “You wonder how hard some people really look,” Forcelli said.
post-conviction claims mostly fail, because courts usually limit appeals to those arising from procedural mistakes, and make it hard to introduce new exonerating evidence.
After having not watched it for many years, in recent months I’ve started watching Dateline NBC. I was quite surprised to find that it pretty much limits its stories to murder trials and the like. It has made me more aware than I’ve ever been that the criminal justice system goes awry a whole lot more often than I ever would have thought. It seems obvious that way too many innocent people are convicted on faulty evidence by prosecutors who for whatever reason aren’t really interested in truth and justice. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from this is that should I ever find myself indicted for a crime I didn’t commit, opting for a non-jury “bench” trial instead of a trial before a jury of “peers” is the best choice. Much better to be judged by someone trained in the law and evidence than a group of thinking-averse people who spend their lives enamored by pop culture.
Years ago I had a friend who was suffering from mental illness and he took a few potshots at a building (no one was injured). When the police arrested him, they immediately tried to pin all the unsolved cases that they had on their books on him. Fortunately he was not so crazy as to confess to things he hadn’t done.
I get the feeling that police and prosecutors are satisfied any time they can get a conviction – this clears the case off their books. Whether the person convicted is not really the one who done it doesn’t concern them that much – they are not the ones who pronounce guilt. I think that they also have the feeling that the folks that they arrest are habitual criminals who have likely gotten away with many crimes so they are not creating bad karma – it’s not like they are taking choir boys off the street and pinning murder one on them.
I was very surprised when they took Tsarnaev alive (not for lack of trying – the boat looked like Swiss cheese from bullet holes). It is an unwritten law of the streets that cop killers are usually killed while “resisting arrest”.
One of the greatest hypocrisies of the conservative right is, on the one hand denouncing government as largely incompetent, while the other fights for the death penalty.
Meanwhile, coming to a neighborhood near you…
Orlando Sentinel, 11/28/16 – Obama grants clemency to Sanford drug dealer who got life in prison
Roger Gaston was at Orlando International Airport, about to board a plane for Canada when he was arrested by a federal agent 18 years ago on a drug conspiracy charge. An Orlando federal jury convicted him a year later…Because he had three prior drug convictions, a federal judge sentenced him to life in prison…
Obama commuted the sentences of 79 more inmates, four of them from Central Florida. That raised to 1,023 his total. He has now granted relief to more inmates than the past 11 presidents combined, the White House announced.