New York State has agreed to pay $4.75 million, the largest wrongful conviction settlement in the state’s history, to a man who served 18 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.
Fernando Bermudez, 45, was convicted of shooting a 16-year-old boy outside a Greenwich nightclub even though (a) he was with friends miles away, (b) the victim’s friends said he wasn’t the shooter, and (c) no physical evidence linked him to the crime. He won release in 2009, then sued the state for $30 million.
In addition to being sent to prison by lying police using perjured testimony, Bermudez was victimized again by one of the most pernicious aspects of our criminal justice system: He was denied parole for maintaining his innocence.
Why does our criminal justice system fail so badly? Why does it send so many innocent people to prison, then keep them there despite exonerating evidence? I can think of at least two reasons. First, police are under pressure to “solve” crimes, and have little or no practical incentive to protect the innocent from wrongful conviction. This is why you see cops fabricating evidence and coercing witnesses. Second, courts are oriented toward closing cases, and are strongly biased in favor of “finality” and against “relitigating” cases. The net result is a system that’s prone to mistakes, and deaf and blind to rectifying them.
Things are improving in a couple of respects, though, both of which are external to the criminal justice system. First, DNA evidence is vastly more reliable than eyewitness testimony, and is being used to free hundreds of wrongly convicted people. Second, the legal profession has developed an “innocence bar” that uses pro bono lawyers and law student volunteers to investigate and push to reopen questionable convictions. They’ve been instrumental in many high-profile exonerations.
But these after-the-fact remedies help only when innocent people have already been harmed by the failures of our police and court systems. Little is being done to prevent injustices in the first place. That will require serious and far-reaching reforms to police training and practices, and court rules and procedures. Allowing convicted persons to continue disputing the finding of guilt after conviction would place extra burdens on the system. But the present practice of throwing innocent people under the bus merely because they’ve been convicted by a system everyone knows is flawed shouldn’t be acceptable to any civilized society with a conscience.