People are losing faith in a number of
America’s institutions because these
institutions are failing miserably.
For example, take the U.S. criminal
justice system. In one week we learned
two things: First, Columbia law professor
James Liebman and his students revealed that
Texas executed an innocent man named Carlos
DeLuna in 1989. DeLuna was executed
for the 1983 brutal stabbing death of a young
woman at a gas station. Forensic
evidence was bungled or destroyed, and the
crime scene quickly cleaned up. The
actual murderer was Carlos Hernandez— a man
with a history of violence who bore a
resemblance to DeLuna, and a self-proclaimed
knife murderer who bragged about committing
the crime. DeLuna’s defense team even
mentioned Hernandez to the jury as the real
killer, but to no avail. Meanwhile, a
condemned man maintained his innocence to his
grave, and apparently all Latinos look alike
to some key actors in the criminal justice
system.
Second, and this relates to the first,
the University of
Michigan Law School and Northwestern
University announced the creation of a National
Registry of Exonerations, a database of over
2,000 prisoners wrongfully convicted of murder
and rape since 1989. The authors of the
database found, among other things, that death
row inmates—who are a quarter of those
exonerated of murder— are exonerated nine
times more often than other murder convicts.
And false convictions are typically the
result of prosecutorial misconduct, perjury
and bad eyewitness testimony.
In other words, the
database confirms what many have maintained
for quite some time, which is that the
imprisonment and execution of innocent men and
women are common, and far more common than you
thought. Carlos DeLuna, Troy Davis and
Cameron Todd Willingham are not aberrations,
but rather part of a troubling pattern.
Moreover, if the
criminal justice system is allowed to exist in
such a broken, dysfunctional and corrupt
state, what does that say about the system
itself, and those who allowed to administer
it? After all, systems and institutions
are made up of human beings, who have their
own agendas, interests, foibles, flaws and
prejudices that often conflict with the common
good. Meanwhile, born and raised in the “land of the
free,” many were conditioned to accept things
as they are, assuming our institutions work
well and in our best interests. Everyone
who is punished is guilty, and the innocent
are protected, or so they believed. But
that’s not always the case. Cracks in the
criminal justice system reflect incompetence
and negligence by some defense lawyers, judges
and prosecutors. And prosecutors, at
their worst, want to score a big win—
regardless of the tactics employed, and never
mind issues of guilt or innocence of the
accused, for that matter. So sometimes,
they will strike black prospective jurors,
coerce witnesses or hide or destroy evidence.
Careers are built, livelihoods made and
profits amassed through the human raw
materials of the prison-industrial complex.
And prisons and their contractors need
warm bodies, sometimes dead bodies, to justify
their existence.
If Carlos DeLuna and
the exonerations database represent a turning
point in the criminal justice system—
particularly the death penalty— then other
systems have had their turning points these
days. For example, problems in the
U.S. financial system, in the form of the
Great Recession, the subprime mortgage fiasco
and the student debt crisis, have precipitated
a public discourse on economic inequality, and
a critical
look at capitalism itself. The conduct
of commercial banks, engaged in risky casino
gambling with other people’s money, has led to
renewed calls for reregulation. Further,
the injection of Bain Capital in this
political season has placed the spotlight on
vulture capitalism, where companies are
chopped up and workers jettisoned, all for the
profits of the few rather than the nation’s
economic well-being.
On the political
side, it was the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens
United, which gave a blessing
to unlimited corporate influence in elections.
This resulted in the birth of the Super
PAC, the expansion of legalized bribery, and
the ability of a small group of hyper-wealthy
individuals to determine the outcome of the
political process. Perhaps one of the
more insidious examples of corporate influence
peddling and the buying of lawmakers was ALEC,
or the American Legislative Exchange Council.
ALEC, sponsored by major corporations,
was responsible for a number of offensive
policy initiatives across the country,
including “stand your ground” laws implicated
in the Trayvon Martin shooting death, forced,
legislation mandating intrusive ultrasounds
for pregnant women seeking abortions, and
voter ID laws that stand to disenfranchise
millions of people.
America’s criminal
justice system is broken, but so are its
economic and political systems. That’s
quite a trifecta. In each case, the
folks running the show are engaged in a
winner-take-all proposition. In their
adversarial worldview governed by pathological
individualism, there always are
winners—themselves and their friends— and
losers—everyone else. As crimes are
committed in high places, we are made to turn
on the wrong enemies, powerless scapegoats
from the poor and working class, and ethnic,
racial and religious minorities. They
make you believe that criminalizing, or
killing, or deporting, or ostracizing these
scapegoats will make your problems go away.
And as they deflect attention from
their own wrongdoing by way of smokescreens,
they count on your undying allegiance to the
system, and fealty to the status quo.
And yet, people are
waking up. When citizens begin to
question the institutions that have failed
them and society for the benefit of the few,
that’s when real change has a chance to peek
through the window. But we run the risk
of missing that window of opportunity.
