Ooops, Our Bad. Here's that 35 Years of Your Life Back?

I would get a blood test and make sure my wheelchair-laden mother was actually my mother. At this point I wouldn't blindly believe anything, and now that he is out of prison he's probably saddled with the job of pushing her around.

 

From this article:

Beyond the testimony of a 9-year-old child who had undergone severe trauma as a result of his rape in the dark, in the middle of the night, under extreme duress, the prosecution contended with a presumably expert witness that stated, on the record, that their one piece of scientific evidence was not valid. How do you convict with that testimony staring you in the face? Who would do such a thing?

A jury in or around good ol' predominantly white Bartow, Florida, named after General Francis Bartlow, the first Confederate officer to die in the American Civil War. That's who. Perhaps an inappropriate venue to try a black man for the rape of a child in 1974? I'm inclined to think so. Was there malice intended on the part of the prosecutor? Maybe, maybe not. Was there a distinct air of laziness, or a desire to present a conviction in a neat little package to an eager and racially skewed public? Very likely.

This is not an excuse. I would hope your average judge knows the difference between a frivolous motion and a legitimate plea for DNA testing that could mean the difference between freedom and spending the rest of your natural life behind bars. Especially one that has been filed four times, and especially since the man was convicted before the development of technology that is now standard procedure in these types of cases, and was not given the benefit of submitting himself to tests that have exonerated God knows how many people since its inception. If said judge does not know the difference, I can safely reiterate my previous statement: I fucking hate the American legal system.

I'm not a lazy racist from Florida so, no, I don't think I should have to pay one cent. They should. My mind isn't clouded by anything. I spent 30 minutes researching this case and can tell, plain as day, that there is no way this person received a fair trial. There was enough reasonable doubt to acquit that man of that charge. Those people were smacked in the face with alibis and evidence, and they pursued a conviction regardless. This one doesn't get laid on society. This one gets laid on Bartlow, Florida. They should pay.

 

I understand what you are saying, and why it seems so fucked that taxpayers must pay-out to compensate for others' mistakes. However, unless I am taking what you are saying way to literally, this just would not work. A jury (typically) decides guilt and punishment. Should we come after them personally for their erroneous decision? A public defender is overworked and sometimes has just hours to meet with the client and investigate the facts of the case, which can lead to pretty poor lawyering. Should we come after them personally for this? When put to a Judge, he or she can't do his or her own investigation; judges are pretty much bound by the record and the law (which in some cases, can be pretty shitty law).

Now when a prosecutor crosses the line from vigorously advocating his or her position with the facts and law available to malfeasance, I agree, there should be personal liability. (And indeed, the Supreme Court is looking at this issue right now: Google Pottawattanie County v. McGhee.) I also agree that it is fucked up that this guy was denied DNA testing four times. Even more fucked up is that he has spent 35 years in prison. It is a fucked up situation and it probably happens all the time. But I also recognize that there are also countless prisoners who will do nothing but file meritless appeals because they have nothing better to do and whose appeals must be reviewed by someone. Are you suggesting those that review these appeals should be personally liable when they make the wrong decision? Absent malfeasance, the government sort of acts like an insurance policy for its employees where it should indemnify them for these mistakes.

As taxpayers, we are constantly paying for these types of mistakes. Whether we are paying to imprison someone for 35 years or paying to compensate him for that wrong. We pay when the police drive someone over while in a high-speed pursuit of a suspect. If you really want to get to micro of it, we pay to have a trial (including the salaries of just about all the people in the room) to acquit an innocent person. I am too uncomfortable with tax money paying to compensate this guy (esp considering that the ones you proposed going after very likely will not be able to make him whole).

 

except maybe.... death?...

 

The job of the prosecutor is to convict the person who they believe is guilty of a crime, for them to do their job they must believe that the person they are trying is guilty. Once they begin to work off that assumption it is very hard for them to just stop and say oh well maybe he’s not guilty. It’s a thankless job that if you truly examine probably is one of the most traumatic professions you can be in. Everyone throwing the prosecutor under the bus has to realize that all he did was make a mistake, his job is about making judgment calls and in this case he made the wrong one. The same way everyone else on this board has made some assumptions or believed something to be true that wasn’t, the prosecutor did the same. I know you will respond with something along the lines of but he has to be more careful and work off the principal that everyone is innocent until proven guilty, but his job is to prove them guilty so that line must be crossed or else the prosecutor would be very inefficient.

Over 1% of the adult U.S. population is incarcerated (Wikipedia but with sources from Dept. of Justice). Of those over 3 million people I’m sure very few of them are sitting and not trying to find some way to get out, and filing as many motions as they can in hopes of finding some technicality to get out. These people have been proven guilty, and although we now see that some of them weren’t, people in the justice system have to work under the assumption that the system is working in a semi-efficient manner or else there is no way they can do their jobs.
Not saying you’re wrong because I haven’t read all the details of the case, just saying that you can’t go blindly yelling at the judge and prosecutor for being horrible people when there isn’t substantial evidence to say they did anything other than the best job they could with the information at hand.

Your mind seems to be clouded by thinking that everyone on the jury was a lazy racist from Florida. By the way, how do you know that your upstanding hometown never had something like this happen, the man that your town falsely convicted could have died in prison and you’d never know it, so stop whining.
And you can tell that the person didn’t receive a fair trial because you’re reading articles that were written 35 years later with the knowledge that the man wasn’t guilty, but if you rewind 35 years and were in the courtroom during the trial, or working as a detective on the case you have no idea what you would have been thinking. None of us were there so none of us can say that we would have done something different than anyone else on the jury. It sounds harsh to say but this is going to happen, there is no way to avoid it, we can only try to minimize the occurrences, and with technological advances we have done so. And, when a situation like this occurs all we can do is try to help this person adjust and enjoy whatever time he has left. But, to say that the prosecutor is at fault or that the jury was racist without having been there is just ignorant.

 

I must respectfully beg to differ.

The prosecutors job is to examine the evidence brought to him by an investigating entity, to conclude, based on legal precedent, if there is probable cause to believe a crime has been committed, and that the person of interest committed said crime. If those conditions exist the prosecutor will bring that evidence to a Grand Jury, composed of average citizens. He will present his evidence to the Grand Jury, who will either return an Indictment, stating only that there are sufficient facts to charge an individual with a crime. Or in the alternative a Grand Jury can return a no bill, and said person shall not be charged with the crime.

If an indictment is returned then it is the job of the Prosecutor to present any such evidence in an open court of law to a judge, and if the defendant so chooses, a Jury.

It is the responsibility of the Jury, or in the absence of a Jury, The presiding Judge to convict, or acquit a defendant.

 

If I'm a juror who needs to make a decision between a defense witness who says blood types don't match, and the state's evidence includes the deposition of the victim, who states

...I would lean toward believing the party whose evidence isn't based on police coercion. But that's me.

Fair enough. Credibility was an issue on both sides of the fence.

You're right. It's unfair to target Bartow by itself. Instead, I propose that a black man could not get a fair trial in Polk County entire at the time of Bain's conviction. Not when there was evidence of attempted racial gerrymandering by the man almost solely responsible for the switch of a large portion of that county from the Democratic Party to the GOP in the early 80s due to his social conservatism and adherence to the 'old way' of doing things. Are we going to deny the existence of racial divisiveness in Central Florida in the mid-20th century? Seriously? We're talking about a county that elected a KKK Grand Dragon to the city council one year ago. You're telling me things have gotten worse since 1974?

As for the race of the victim, I don't think it matters. If race was a motivating factor in Bains' conviction, then a black rapist is still a black rapist who, in this instance, may have raped a black child. Better to lock him up now before he goes after a white child, right?

I admit that I'm probably overreaching in my attempt to paint these people as one giant lynch-mob, and I shouldn't have used as conclusive a tone as I did. But the attitude was there, and apparently still is. It's not hard to see how something like this could happen. You call it ignorance on my part. I call it pessimism.

See above. I don't think it would even require the individual jurors to maintain racist mentalities. It was mired in the public consciousness. Prosecutors want to keep their job. Judges want to stay on the bench. And even if half or all the jury was black, it's not difficult to see why there might be considerable pressure on those jurors to produce a conviction regardless of how they personally feel. If you're white, you have your reputation to think about. If you're black, you have your personal safety to consider. Remember, this is KKK country.

Four motions denied? This is common practice, to have four motions requesting DNA testing denied over a nine-year period? Tell me it is, and I will believe you. I will be shocked and saddened, but I will take your word for it.

 

Beefy Phil I understand what you're saying but I think that it's really hard to have this debate 35 years later because it's a completely different world we live in now. I don't know if you were alive back then, I sure as hell wasn't but I think that in order to talk about it we must keep in perspective the world they were living in then.
It will start with the detectives/prosecutor wanting to convict a black man, but that was just because of the way they were raised. Then it's the town that influenced them that should be blamed. But the town was only like that because of the county they lived in, which was only like that because of the state they lived in. Eventually you'll branch out and be able to blame the whole country for its attitude towards race in the 1970's.
I agree with some of your points and disagree with others, I just think that it's impossible to put blame on people when we don't know anything about what their life was like, what was going on with them at that time or much else about them other then that they made a mistake.

 

We're not talking about 1066 A.D. It was 1974, man. A full decade after the Civil Rights act was passed. Edward Brooke was sitting in the United States Senate when Bains went on trial. Those people absolutely chose to believe what they believed. I do not and will not excuse them for it based on some nonsensical adage about "the times they lived in."

 

I'm going to try and steer this in a slightly different direction, but feel free to continue the debate. It's quite enjoyable.

I reckon that at 54 years old, this guy doesn't have enough time left to spend pissed off about what could've and should've been. He got fucked, plain and simple. That much is clear, regardless of who was wrong, why they were wrong, and what went wrong.

I'm hoping whatever years he has left will be enjoyable for him, and that the parties responsible for such a massive fuck up will make life comfortable for him and his mother. I think the American justice system is fucked beyond repair, but humans as a whole are pretty good folk. Perhaps one will step up and help him out.

Hope for the best, I suppose. Naive as it may be.

 

Oh those poor, innocent jurors/judge/prosecutor. Their fragile, tender mind-sets, which totally absolve them of their sins. Boo-fucking-hoo.

Those people are guilty. They are sinners. They did wrong. Actions matter, not words. No excuses in the world change they took from an innocent man, and based on the facts of the case, there is even reason to speculate whether it was due to more than just plain incompetence.

You write as if every biased judge or courtroom has had similar fuck-ups in their history. But they haven't. Cases like this one are an extreme rarity. They result from gross incompetence/stupidity/hate from a large number of people involved.

Focus-

Hopefully, this poor man can live another 20 relatively healthy, comfortable years, so that the majority will have been spent outside of jail.

 

All that I can think about this whole sad thing is: what if this happened to me?
To spend thirty five years in a prison surrounded by rapists and murderers knowing in your heart that you were innocent?
And then to be cleared of all charges and released, missing my twenties, thirties and forties?
I'd be seriously thinking about revenge of some sort.
I hope he gets paid some serious scratch so he doesn't have to worry about thinking up a job he'd have to get.

I believe that our system has it's flaws but, it's our system. When it goes horribly wrong there should be a price to pay.
Also, how long would you get stuck as a registered sex-offender? Your whole life would just be fucked.
I'd have to pull a Jay & Silent Bob. When they use their money to fly around and beat the crap out of people who were talking shit about them on the internet. If any of those idiot jurors were still alive anyway.
Fuck those stupid jurors, fuck them in their stupid asses.

 

Also, one thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that this guy went to prison, at the tender age of 19, under the false stigma of being a pedophile. Considering where pedophiles are considered to be on the criminal totem pole, I'd imagine he had a particularly horrible experience.

Edit: Actual pedophiles of course deserve what they get.

 

It it was me, I would probably go Edmond Dantes on the DA, judge, members of the jury, whoever I felt was responsible for me being wrongly incarcerated. My life was fucked, so now I'm going to fuck yours. I'd take ten or fifteen years, whatever it took to semi-reincorporate myself into society and come up with enough resources to to enact some kind of twisted revenge. My life, as it stands... I consider myself a pretty forgiving guy. But I just can't see being anything but a bitter vindictive bastard in this guy's situation.

 

Beefy Phil how can you at one point say that the white jurors had their reputations to think about and the blacks their safety and then at another say that you can't mitigate any racially motivated actions by the pressures of society and the world in which people were living in 1974. Also, although you said the Civil Rights movement occurred ten years earlier, I'm pretty sure most of the jurors were older than ten, so they were all raised in a racist society (not just a KKK loving racist string em up town in Florida but an overall racist country). But that is getting way off topic.

You also don't know the intricate details of the case or what was going on at the time, if you were walking in the prosecutors shoes you may have believed in the defendant's guilt too, but we can never know that so you can continue to throw mud around about how he is a terrible person. Maybe he was racist and just wanted to put another black man in jail, or maybe he was just trying to do his job and that's the man that he believed to be responsible for the crimes against a 9 year old. So far all that I've seen put forth on this board is the alibi of his sister and DNA evidence which wasn't available back then. Oh and the fact that everyone is racist in Florida so they just want to put black men in jail.

 

Focus:

Sell the rights to you story and have Denzel Washington play you in the movie.

 

I'm not painting the entire population as racist based on the color of their skin, or some other arbitrary factor. I'm looking at the policies of that municipality and the elected officials chosen by its residents to represent their interests. If there is a clearer indication of the area's mindset, I have yet to see it. I'm not saying the county was entirely racist, down to the last man, woman and child. I'm saying it might have been racist enough. It's not enough to state with absolute certainty that race was the primary factor in Bain's conviction and I was wrong to do so before, but the motive is clearly there.

Public opinion doesn't effect verdicts? Outside pressure to produce a popular decision isn't placed on jurors? It's not possible that pervasive racism in that community might have adversely effected those individuals' ability to make the right decision, whatever their personal beliefs? When that decision was handed down, they had to go home. They had to see their neighbors and co-workers every day, and they had to decide whether or not they wanted to be seen as the people who put a rapist in jail, or the people who let a rapist go free. You're a lawyer. You know it's more than possible. In a perfect world, jurors vote their conscience. This is most definitely not a perfect world.

If that was the case, and the child admitted in deposition that detectives led him to identify Bain as his attacker, why would the prosecutor proceed? Several reports of the case clearly state that the conviction was based largely on an eyewitness account that was unabashedly skewed. Why would it even be permitted as evidence? You have to admit, something about it stinks.

I didn't say they weren't influenced by mindset of the times. I said that I will not excuse them for it. There is a difference.