Salon.com > Criminal Justice System

Our outrageous Enron-style justice system

Mon, 13 May 2013 12:00:00 +0000

There is Too Big to Jail - and now there is Too Big to Keep In Jail.

This is the envelope-pushing precedent being set by the Justice Department in its dealings with convicted Enron executive Jeffrey Skilling - a.k.a. one of the hucksters whose rip-off schemes were responsible for, among other things, losing more than $2 billion of retirees' pension funds.

In a revised sentencing agreement announced late last week, federal prosecutors cited the "extraordinary resources" required to litigate Skilling's appeals as justification for reducing his sentence by more than 10 years. NBC News reports that in exchange, "Skilling would give up all of his remaining rights to appeal" and "he also would give up any claims to the $40 million he was ordered to forfeit" to the Enron victims fund. Reuters notes that such a sum - which will be handed over to a "depleted" victims fund - "pales in comparison" to the "$70 million Skilling has spent on legal fees."

Who will prosecute the corrupt prosecutors?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 18:26:00 +0000

The murder case against Tony Bennett seemed pretty straightforward.

Shortly before midnight on May 7, 1994, police found a 26-year-old man in the foyer of an apartment building near Flushing, Queens. Jake Powell was near death, blood pouring from a gunshot wound, but he managed to speak the name of the man who had shot him: "Tony Bennett."

Steubenville rapists can be saved

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 11:45:00 +0000

When the lawyer for Ma’lik Richmond, one of the two teens convicted in the Steubenville rape case, went on "The Piers Morgan Show" Tuesday night and said his client would appeal the verdict, he sounded, well, like a rape apologist. It was unfair for Richmond to be on a sex offender list, the lawyer, Walter Madison, had argued, because “I don't believe that a person at 75 years old should have to explain for something they did at 16 when scientific evidence would support your brain isn't fully developed.”

Incredulous, Morgan retorted, “I got three teenage sons and when you get to 16, 17 ... your brain's developed enough to know you shouldn't be raping girls."

But here's the thing: While Richmond and his fellow offender Trent Mays are justly being held accountable for their crimes, Madison was actually citing medical consensus.

“They have not completed their neurological development. That carries through until their early 20s,” says Elizabeth Letourneau, associate professor at the Bloomberg School of Health at Johns Hopkins and the director of the Moore Center for the Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse. “They don't attend as much to the downside of what they're going to do as much as they attend to the pleasure or reward. Their brains are in fact different and cause them to behave differently.”

In prison debate, race overshadows poverty

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 21:23:00 +0000

Racial discrimination is often used to explain the fact that 1 percent of American adults is behind bars and that we're the only Western democracy not to have abolished the death penalty. Given that America’s prisoners are disproportionately black and Hispanic, this is understandable. But what's often overlooked is class -- even though the clear majority of white, black and Hispanic prisoners stems from the underclass and working class.

Criminal justice systems are largely a reflection of economic systems. It is no coincidence that their practices are the most humane in Scandinavian countries, known for their high degree of economic solidarity. In a society marked by sharp wealth inequality, such as modern-day America, the criminal justice system can come to negate solidarity and embody the notion that those at the bottom rungs of society are little more than a nuisance. Thus, the U.S. criminal justice system emphasizes harsh retribution, disfavors rehabilitation and tends to ignore social factors behind crime, such as poverty, failing public schools or lax gun control.

Truman Capote’s greatest lie

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:45:00 +0000

Questions about the accuracy of "In Cold Blood," the seminal 1966 "nonfiction novel" by Truman Capote, are nothing new; they bubbled up as soon as the book was published. Capote himself — who always maintained that "In Cold Blood" was "immaculately factual" — made thousands of changes (some grammatical, some factual) to the true-crime classic between its initial four-part-serial publication in the New Yorker and its appearance in book form the next year. His sources and critics have challenged aspects of the text ranging from the price of a horse to whether or not a graveside conversation that appears in the book's concluding pages ever occurred.

Two recent developments, however, shed a particularly troubling light on Capote's account of the 1959 murders of four members of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kan. They pertain to the search for the crime's perpetrators, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, and to an additional four murders they are suspected of committing. In the first development, the Wall Street Journal recently reported on a dispute over records of the investigation. These documents, currently in the possession of Ron Nye, were taken home years ago by his late father, Harold Nye, one of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation detectives assigned to the case.

Why can’t law enforcement admit their mistakes?

Sun, 21 Oct 2012 14:00:00 +0000

After honor student Stephanie Crowe was stabbed to death in her bedroom in Escondido, California in January 1998, police briefly questioned (and collected clothes from) Richard Tuite, a drug-addicted, mentally ill transient who had been spotted prowling nearby the previous evening and scaring the Crowes’ neighbors. But the first person to get the third degree by detectives was Stephanie’s 14-year-old brother Michael, who weathered 10 hours of grueling interrogation without his parents or attorney present.

Michael was told – falsely – that his 12-year-old sister’s blood was found in his room, that his hair was discovered between her fingers and that his voice stress analyzer test showed deception. Eventually, Michael cracked. He told detectives he had no memory of the crime, but he would be willing to make something up for them.

Can we predict a wrongful conviction?

Sun, 09 Sep 2012 14:00:00 +0000

While the law enforcement community widely views American jurisprudence as being rich with built-in safeguards, from the right to counsel to the right not to be physically abused by police officers, citizens’ protections aren’t always up to the task. People are sometimes convicted of crimes they didn’t commit.

Analyzing the errors that led to wrongful convictions, recurring themes emerge. Steven Drizin, clinical professor at Northwestern University of Law, and cofounder of its Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth, and social psychologist Richard Leo posit that the errors are sequential. And as they stack up, says Drizin, they “develop a momentum that is very difficult to stop.” Safeguards in the system become “like speed bumps at best. They don’t do anything to really slow down that momentum towards a wrongful conviction.”