Citing several wrongful convictions examined on wrongfulconvictionsreport.org in his forthcoming book, Truth Be Told – Presumption of Evil 2, author Andrew L. Urban condemns the justice system’s seeming indifference to injustice.
While Truth Be Told reveals how the late Frank Valentine was convicted of historical sexual assaults of minors on the say-so of six complainants from the one institution, it also places the case in the wider context of the entire criminal justice system.
Readers may ponder not just at the many stories of injustice, but how callously the so called justice system allows such catastrophic outcomes to languish uncorrected. It is estimated that in the Anglosphere wrongful convictions of serious crimes account for 2 – 6% of prison inmates. If an airline had such a record of passenger injuries it would be grounded for ever. In 2021, for example, the U.S., commercial carriers flew over 7.8 million flights, with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigating 24 accidents. These resulted in 14 serious injuries and no deaths.
A society that cares so little about wrongful convictions is destined to incur the wrath of history; a legal system that does so is destined to lose the trust of the community and its legitimacy.
In the introduction to their book, Three False Convictions, Many Lessons: The Psychopathology of Unjust Prosecutions (Waterside Press), David C. Anderson and Adam Kirsch write:
“This book is for anyone who cares about justice. It is principally about the workings of the criminal law and specifically false allegations and charges that were compounded by defects in the justice systems (Italy, UK, US). It is meant to stir up thought and action by politicians, pressure groups and individuals of conscience who may suspect that the law, being riddled with complex rules, has for far too long been left entirely in the hands of lawyers. All too often it appears to be obsessed with process, procedure and legalities and to have ignored its primary purpose of delivering justice.” Amen….
Citing the Stefan Kiszko and Darlie Routier cases in their book, the authors find “the tendency of the justice systems towards a form of psychopathology – or ‘lock down’ – in which questions concerning the correctness of prosecutions, convictions or punishment are avoided on the basis that the system or its practitioners could not have got things so wrong. There are many other such examples from history in which supposed infallibility prevailed over plain common sense, getting at the truth and putting wrongs right.” Amen to that, too …
Like a long neglected overgrown garden, all weeds and prickly thistles, the legal system needs weeding and much remedial attention.