Contrast the Willingness of Whites to Pay Liability Judgments for Wrongful Convictions w/ Their Unwillingness to Properly Fund Education for Black Kids or Provide Adequate Housing Food or Healthcare
Dr. Amos Wilson explains:
"Given the historical and contemporary virulence of White racism in America and the injustice toward Blacks that such racism engenders, the number of arrests, incarcerations, and in many instances, convictions of Black males should be viewed with a jaundiced eye. The willingness of White Americans to heavily tax themselves in order to finance accelerated and increased prison construction, rapidly expanding police forces and so-called criminal justice system personnel, burgeoning private police and security establishments; their willingness to finance the incarceration of a Black male prisoner upwards of $30,000 to $40,000 per year, in sharp contrast to their unwillingness to tax themselves to provide for the appropriate funding of the education of Black children and to commit themselves to the ending of racist employment practices; to provide adequate housing medical care, food and clothing; clearly implies that alleged Black male criminality plays a very important role in defining the collective White American ego and personality. [MORE]
From [HERE] Studies have consistently found that a system of criminal law in which the death penalty is available as a punishment is far more expensive than a system in which the most severe punishment is life without parole or a long prison term. Now, as the number of murder exonerations mounts across the United States, a previously hidden cost is emerging: the cost of liability for police and prosecutorial misconduct associated with 9the wrongful use or threatened use of the death penalty.
The innocence movement has shown that, in addition to the increased costs associated with investigation, pretrial detention, prosecution, jury selection, trial and sentencing, appeal, and incarceration in death-penalty cases, wrongful capital prosecutions are costing state and local taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Two factors drive up the costs of wrongful conviction judgments: official misconduct and length and severity of incarceration.
Both factors are increasingly present in death-row exonerations. DPIC’s February 2021 Special Report: The Innocence Epidemic found that the average time between a death-row conviction and exoneration has risen every decade since the 1970s, to more than 21 years for the 29 exonerations in the 2010s and more than 25 years for the 7 exoneration so far this decade. More than 90% of the cases in which it took two or more decades to exonerate a person who had been wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death involved police or prosecutorial misconduct. Most of the time, that official misconduct occurred in concert with perjured witness testimony or false accusation, which was present in 85% of the death-row exonerations that took 20 years or more.
In May 2021, a federal jury in North Carolina awarded intellectually disabled death-row exonerees Henry McCollum and Leon Brown (pictured) $75 million dollars for the wrongful imprisonment stemming from their convictions and death sentences in the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. No physical evidence linked the brothers to the murder, but they were convicted on the basis of false confessions extracted by coercive police interrogations. The North Carolina courts overturned the death sentence imposed on Brown, who was 15 at the time of the murder and 16 when he was sentenced to death. He spent 30 years in jail before being exonerated. McCollum, who was 19 at the time of the offense, spent three decades on death row.
In May 2020, the city of Cleveland agreed to pay $18 million dollars to settle a civil rights lawsuit by three former death-row prisoners who, as a result of police misconduct, spent more than a combined 80 years imprisoned for a murder they did not commit. Kwame Ajamu, his brother Wiley Bridgeman (who died June 27, 2021), and Rickey Jackson were convicted in 1975 of the robbery and murder of Harold Franks based on the coerced false testimony of a 12-year-old boy. Police also fabricated evidence and withheld evidence of the men’s innocence.
An investigative report by the Philadelphia Inquirer found that at least 13 wrongful murder prosecution lawsuits were pending against the city of Philadelphia as of June 13, 2021, with the cases of seven other murder exonerees still within the time limitation for filing suit. Samantha Melamad reports that “[t]ogether, the plaintiffs served 365 years in prison for convictions that were overturned by courts for reasons ranging from significant legal errors to egregious misconduct by police or prosecutors to compelling evidence of innocence.” Many of the cases involved the threat or use of the death penalty against defendants or witnesses. The seven settlements since 2018 have cost a total of $34 million to the city of Philadelphia and cases involving the use or threat of the death penalty make up more than $16 million of that total. [MORE]