Innocence is fine, but what happened to remedies for ‘unfortunate guilt’?

I’ve been focused elsewhere today but here are several items that each might deserve its own, separate post if I had time:

Did faulty medical evidence help secure molestation convictions?
The SA Express-News has posted online their story of the possible wrongful conviction of four women accused of child molestation in the ’90s. The “San Antonio Express-News investigation — including interviews with witnesses and experts and a review of police reports, medical studies and thousands of pages of trial transcripts and other court documents — raises troubling questions about the scientific legitimacy of medical evidence deployed against the women, whether authorities checked a previous rape allegation made by the girls and whether anti-gay views prejudiced Ramirez’s jury.”

Inquire no more
The Third Court of Appeals shut down the Todd Willingham court of inquiry, declaring Judge Charlie Baird abused his discretion. See their ruling. Also, after looking at the related caselaw, Mark Bennett didn’t think much of the decision by the Court of Criminal Appeals to shut down an inquiry in Houston into the constitutionality of the death penalty. Perhaps if nobody inquires, all these questions will just go away? Or maybe not.
 
Reasonable suspicion is in the eye of the beholder
Check out a discussion at Liberty and Justice for Y’all of the devolving state of reasonable suspicion at DWI stops, commenting on the Court of Criminal Appeals decision to overturn an intermediate court ruling to allow a stop based on “flimsy” cause. And speaking of DWI enforcement, Paul Kennedy has interesting posts up here and here about increasingly popular no-refusal policies, and reports a rumor that state Sen. Dan Patrick wants to eliminate Administrative License Revocation hearings in a way that would conflate criminal and administrative governmental roles.

A matter of time
I noticed this preliminary story about new inmate litigation over inadequate healthcare at a TDCJ facility. Given Texas’ chronic underfunding of inmate healthcare, if what’s happening in California is any indication, it’s only a matter of time before these suits begin to succeed if the state doesn’t sufficiently invest in healthcare for inmates or else reduce their overall number.
Tipping point or temporary plateau?
The overall number of people in the United States under control of the criminal justice system – in prison, jail, on probation, or on parole – declined last year for the first time since such data began being gathered in 1980 according to a new report (pdf) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Reading corner
I was just sent a review copy of Rev. Alan Bean’s new book “Taking out the trash in Tulia, Texas,” which tells the story of the infamous Tulia drug stings from one of the front-line warriors fighting to free those wrongly convicted. Also, I saw an interesting looking book on the shelf while I was Christmas shopping and then noticed a review of “The Killer of Little Shepherds: A true crime story and the birth of forensic science.”

Restorative justice and shame
At Women in Crime Ink Vickie Pynchon writes that “The concept of reintegrative shaming was first introduced by restorative justice theoretician John Braithwaite  as a means of distinguishing between shame that stigmatizes criminal offenders (and thus increases crime) from shame that condemns wrongdoing but forgives and respects the offender, hopefully reducing recidivism and decreasing crime.”
NYC: Send ’em back
In New York, NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg is asking state government to do something that may be foisted onto Texas counties against their will: Get rid of youth prisons and let New York City handle its own criminal youth.

A remedy for ‘unfortunate guilt’
Here’s an excellent quote from Alexander Hamilton on the need for a robust clemency policy, writing as Publius in Federalist Paper No. 74: “Humanity and good policy conspire to dictate, that the benign prerogative of pardoning should be as little as possible fettered or embarrassed. The criminal code of every country partakes so much of necessary severity, that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.” Notice the author was not only concerned with pardons for innocence, but also for “unfortunate guilt.” Today, of course, executive pardon power is extraordinarily “fettered” and quite frequently “embarrassed” (think Mike Huckabee), disregarding Hamilton’s sage and prescient advice.

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