An Ohio judge today freed two black men who’ve spent 40 years behind bars for a murder they didn’t commit. They were convicted and sentenced to death on nothing more than the coerced testimony of a 12-year-old boy who merely repeated rumors he’d heard to police. The cops told him that he would go to jail, and his mother also would go to jail, if he didn’t testify against the men.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/men-walk-free-40-years-prison-crime-commit/story?id=27095382
I’ve written about our deeply flawed criminal justice system before. And no part of it is more deeply flawed than cops without conscience who will lie, intimidate, coerce witnesses, and fabricate evidence to “solve” crimes. But you’ve got to wonder what the jury was thinking, too. How can you convict someone of a capital crime, and then recommend the death penalty, when the prosecution gives you nothing more than the unsupported say-so of a kid? Where is people’s common sense?
Maybe the fact these guys have black skin made them look guilty. Every time I read another one of these stories, the innocent prisoners are always blacks. The court system doesn’t seem to do this to white people, or at least, certainly not nearly as much.
