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.”
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.”
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.
