'Making a Murderer' and failing justice system (Opinion) - CNN.com - 0 views
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Laws are designed to keep chaos at bay, to set a foundation for a civil society. My not slowing down fast enough was not a threat to the social order.
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About the time of my last ticket, the country was fighting over O.J. Simpson. Most white Americans were horrified that because they believed he got away with a double murder and didn't want to know about prosecutorial mistakes and dubious police actions. Most black people cheered that a system they had long believed was corrupt had been beaten, for once. A lead detective lying on the stand, using the n-word and bragging about planting evidence were not incidental facts to them
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"Making a Murderer" is forcing us to confront those disparate views anew, as well as encouraging us to better understand that the people who are ticketed or jailed and imprisoned more, and more harshly, than the rest of us aren't necessarily more deserving of punishment than those of us who have skated by dent of birth, happenstance or policy design.
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"The clear majority of Americans of all races have violated drug laws. But due to resource constraints (and the politics of the drug war), only a small fraction are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated," she wrote. "In 2002, for example, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, compared to 1.5 million drug arrests and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense."
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everyone is innocent until proven guilty; you will only be convicted if there is no real doubt that you committed the crime -- are either outright lies or fantastical tales we tell ourselves.
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Avery spent almost 18 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit. DNA testing done by the Innocence Project proved that a different man was the assailant. While he served time, the actual rapist was free to hurt other women. That man, Gregory Allen, is serving a 60-year prison sentence for a 1995 rape.
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Since the airing of the documentary, we've learned that a juror in the Avery case said the verdict was a sort of compromise, that not everyone in the room believed he had done what he had been charged with: the definition of reasonable doubt if ever there was one. No matter; they sent him to prison anyway.
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"The 'reasonable doubt' rule was not originally designed to serve the purpose it is asked to serve today: It was not originally designed to protect the accused. Instead, it was designed to protect the souls of the jurors against damnation," he wrote.
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An alternate juror told me there's no doubt he would have voted not guilty had he been the 12th, not 13th juror -- which would have been enough to set Huggins free. Talk about arbitrary. Because of that roll of the dice, Huggins sits in prison hoping an appeal is successful instead of raising his young kids and taking care of his elderly mother.
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I complained about the arbitrariness of a cop giving me a ticket in a speed trap. That's nothing compared to what men like Avery and Huggins -- and too many others -- face. Finally, the public seems to be recognizing that ugly reality.