There is only one reason that anyone is wrongfully convicted; corrupt prosecutors and police. As long as we allow corrupt prosecutors and police to live, it will keep happening.
Agree that some are corrupt, but find it really creepy how you say they shouldn't be allowed to live. They should be in jail.
There are corrupt DAs and corrupt cops. There are just corrupt people in every walk of life. Period. I think it's creepy that you say that corrupt prosecutors and cops shouldn't be allowed to live. I think they should go to jail if they knowingly convict an innocent person or tamper with evidence.
Wrongful convictions are not always deliberate. Police and DAs can be convinced by circumstantial evidence that someone is guilty and the juries often agree. There have been cases of mistaken identity where a witness is positive that a person is the one who committed the crime. Despite eye witness testimony not being nearly as reliable as many would think, it's taken as solid proof much of the time.
It's when prosecutors are willing to do anything in order to get a conviction that we see the worst kind of corruption.
San Diego boasts of a very high conviction rate. I think sometimes they put their careers first and getting convictions makes it appear that they are getting criminals off the streets. Helps to instill confidence from the public and get District Attorney's re-elected. Of course, if they have convicted the wrong person, no one is any safer. It's all an illusion, but if their career is their first priority, they don't feel bad about locking up some innocent people. The public is given a false sense of security and the DAs keep their jobs.
I think sometimes it's just sloppy police work, maybe from lack of experience. The Jon Benet Ramsey case would fit that. Police who aren't used to investigating murder cases are going to make a lot of mistakes. If that case hadn't been national news for weeks, it may well have ended with the wrong suspect being arrested to allay public fears. When the entire country is watching, they are less likely to play games.
When a lack of evidence or witnesses produces a suspect, they tend to go by statistics to look for the most likely suspect. Say a woman is murdered in her home. The husband will get looked at first. If he has an alibi or the woman was single, they go to boyfriends, neighbors or any convicted felons living in the area. They look till they find one that seems to fit and then build a case.
Of course, we all know the best way is to find evidence, however small, and see where it leads. This would happen the majority of time if mayors and the public didn't demand that police find the person yesterday. Under intense pressure to catch a criminal, they sometimes choose a likely suspect and then try to fit any evidence into a case against that person. This is where exonerating evidence has been ignored and even evidence tampered with or created, such as planting blood evidence in a person's home. Once they publicly accuse someone of a crime, they don't back down, regardless of evidence or lack of it. I think some are more likely to worry about covering their own tracks than admitting they got it wrong.
DAs generally rely on media to try the case in the news before the trial even begins. Great way to taint the jury pool well ahead of trial. Anything from a person's past is bought up to attack their character. If a couple had a fight witnessed by neighbors or a person ever got into a physical fight with someone, the DA will paint them as violent. Things like life insurance policies are cited as motives. If it's a sizeable amount, they say it was a plot to get rich. If the amount was fairly small, they claim that was on purpose so the insurance company wouldn't balk at writing a check without question.
One woman in California was convicted of poisoning her husband and the DAs case was flimsy at best. Not a shred of evidence, but a campaign in the media that attacked the way the woman grieved managed to get her life without the possibility of parole. If her lawyer hadn't fallen on his sword and admitted that he didn't do a good enough job, she would have rotted in jail. She was granted a new trial but the DA knew a retrial would be a huge embarrassment because the new lawyer would pick apart the flimsy case, so she magically found a second set of tissue samples taken from the autopsy (that she had claimed numerous times no longer existed) and had them retested. The tests showed that the husband was not poisoned. Not only was the woman innocent, there wasn't even a crime and she was released from jail. This was the Cindy Sommer case in San Diego, which you can look up.
It was a great example of how you can ruin a reputation by basically spreading gossip.
You could make Mother Theresa look guilty with the methods used by many DAs.
Thankfully, we have the Innocence Project, which had managed to prove thousands of people are innocent through DNA testing. Of course, most cases don't have DNA evidence and it's tough to get a second trial without overwhelming proof. Judges like to side with the DAs even when the evidence is underwhelming.
I think most of the time, they worry about getting it right. There are always those people, in any occupation, that put their own careers first, but most just want to do their jobs well. It doesn't help that there is so much pressure to catch criminals immediately. Good detective work takes time and it's better to take a few years than to build a bogus case just to make themselves look good.
