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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 9/17/2003 5:07 PM (GMT -6) |   | Today there was the following article in the prism e-pistle.
TAKE ACTION NOW: Urge your legislators to pass the
Innocence Protection Act!
In the past three decades, 111 people have been
exonerated from death rows in the United States.
Many of them struggled for over a decade to prove
their innocence. The Innocence Protection Act would
increase access to DNA testing and raise the
standards and compensation for lawyers representing
those accused of capital crimes. Passage of this
bill will be a first step to ensuring that no
innocent person is sentenced to death in this
country.
In the last Congress, 250 House members and 32
Senators co-sponsored the Innocence Protection Act.
It even passed out of the Senate Judiciary
Committee. The current Congress is negotiating a new
bill and YOUR help is needed to make it a more
successful piece of legislation. To send a letter,
fax or email today, encouraging passage of the
Innocence Protection Act, go to the following link:
http://www.capwiz.com/moratorium/mail/oneclick_compo
se/?alertid=3387501
Tonight, I wrote the following letter to E-pistle...
Regarding the innocent protection act, as I understand it, stiffening the evidence requirements for someone to receive the death-penalty should reduce the chance of an innocent being electrocuted. However, at the same time, it inevitably makes it less likely that a guilty person will be convicted. Because supporters of the death penalty and opponents of the bill believe
that the death-penalty has a deterrence effect on murder, there is an
alternative political course that may help ensure the eventual full-passage of the innocent protection act. Why not, in those states that have the death-penalty, seek a randomized testing of the impact of the act? Try to make it so that for maybe two or three years murders in a randomly-chosen subset of counties will be subject to the innocent protection act, while the others will follow the usual procedures.
This will permit us to look at the percentage reduction in the number of death-penalty convictions under the act at the same time we look at whether there is a significant percentage increase in the per-100,000 person murder-rate under the act. This is done by comparing the change in the two-variables in the counties where the act is implemented with the change in those counties where the act is not implemented. What this does is give you a chance to evaluate the full-impact of the act and, perhaps, answer your opponents' main argument against it with objective evidence as to what would be the overall reduction in the likelihood of a death-penalty conviction and whether it would have the unintended consequence of increasing the murder-rate.
Another reason to advocate for the randomized testing of the act instead of its immediate full-passage is that, generally, when one sets more modest political goals, as such, one's probability of success is higher. As Christians, we must count cost of how we use our political activism, since time and energy spent on one issue is time and energy not spent on other issues. Setting more modest targets on a given issue will permit us to accomplish more in other areas and, with randomization, eventually have a longer-term impact on policy changes.
The concept of randomization has been employed here in Mexico initially under a program called Progresa started under Pres. Zedillo. The purpose of Progresa was to show that when one links cash-transfers to whether or not people seek health-care or make their children get more education then this improves their health-well-being and cognitive ability. The initial randomization over what counties received the program enabled them to show that the program worked and would be continued. These sorts of programs
using randomization are now being emulated elsewhere in Latin America and the World.
Randomization could also be used in the US to gradually reform our tax-code or effect welfare-reform. One could test for how strong of an economic incentive-effect tax-cuts or increases would have by selecting subsets of tax-payers to face slightly higher or lower tax-rates than the rest of the population in the coming year. If we had randomized Bush's tax-cuts by having them apply to only a small percentage of the wealthy then the US would not have as big of a projected deficit right now and we could infer how strong their incentive effects would be. So, in conclusion, randomized
testing serves the purpose of helping us to resolve long-standing conflicts revolving around the full consequences of different policy regimes, by allowing us to observe the different policy regimes' effects both before and after changes are made.
Professor David L. Wetzell, Economist
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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DLW
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 2457
| Posted 12/5/2003 6:27 AM (GMT -6) | | Returned to Life
By BOB HERBERT
Published: December 5, 2003
I'm an educator," said David Protess. "I try to teach my students to be better reporters, and a few times we've gotten lucky."
Mr. Protess is a professor at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism in Chicago. In those instances when he and his students have "gotten lucky," they have provided a powerful corrective to an insufficiently recognized evil in our society: the conviction, incarceration and sometimes the sentencing to death of people who are innocent.
It's an enormous problem, far more widespread than most Americans realize. (Two days ago an Oklahoma man who had served 20 years for a rape conviction was freed after DNA tests showed he was innocent.)
Using the techniques of investigative journalism, the professor and his students have exposed tragic miscarriages of justice in a number of high-profile cases in Illinois. Their efforts led to the exoneration in 1999 of Anthony Porter, who came within a whisker of being executed. That case had a big influence on the governor at the time, George Ryan, who eventually commuted the sentences of all prisoners on death row.
Governor Ryan was shaken by the "systemic failures" of the death penalty machinery in Illinois, where several condemned inmates had to be released from prison altogether.
"Anthony Porter was 48 hours away from being wheeled into the execution chamber, where the state would kill him," Mr. Ryan said.
Professor Protess and his students also turned around a case known as the Ford Heights 4, perhaps the worst miscarriage of justice in Illinois history. Four men collectively served 65 years behind bars for a double murder they hadn't committed. Two of the men served a combined 29 years on death row.
All have been exonerated and released.
Obviously the professor and his students are more than just lucky. At a time when the United States is locking up so-called terror suspects for indefinite periods without any charges being filed, and without even the right to see an attorney, Mr. Protess is providing a nonstop seminar on how to live up to the gilt-edged ideals of fairness and justice that are the cornerstone of American greatness.
Today his contribution will get the kind of recognition it deserves. An announcement will be made at a press conference in Chicago that Mr. Protess is the winner of this year's $100,000 Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship.
The award is given jointly by the Puffin Foundation of New Jersey and the Nation Institute, a foundation started in 1966 by the owners of The Nation magazine.
In an interview, Professor Protess said he initially was surprised by the number of cases he and his students encountered in which the prisoners were innocent. "I'd always thought that miscarriages of justice were an aberration and that our justice system, overwhelmingly, worked well," he said. "But I was seeing error rates of 10 to 15 percent. I was very struck by how pervasive the problem was."
I asked if he thought any innocent people had actually been executed.
"Oh, absolutely," he said. "There's just no question."
I also believe, from my own reporting, that innocent people have been put to death. Proof, however, is difficult to obtain because people are unwilling to do an extensive investigation after someone has been executed.
"You have to triage the cases," said Mr. Protess. "Do you want to investigate the case of somebody who's alive on death row who may be innocent, or somebody who's already been put to death?"
The professor said he will use some of his prize money to expand his investigations to other states, and to establish a project to help ease the transition of exonerated inmates to daily life outside prison.
Despite the enormity of the problem of wrongful convictions (there are thousands of innocent people rotting in prisons across the country), Professor Protess believes events are moving in the right direction. Media coverage is increasing. DNA evidence is becoming more widely available. And there is increasing support for legislation designed to address the problem of prisoners who are innocent.
As for the work that he and his students are doing: "Some people think it's inspiring," the professor said. "I think it's dismaying. Seniors in college should not be the last line of defense against an innocent person being executed."
Niebuhr thought that sustained moral energy in politics depended on religion's power to mobilize reason along with self-transcending love. The prophetic tradition, meanwhile, gave Jews and Christians some protection against the temptation to identify their social causes with God's will. Lincoln's second inaugural address expressed the prophetic insight, "The almighty has His own purposes." | | Back to Top | | |
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