EDITORIAL: UNITED STATES INJUSTICE SYSTEM

Imagine you are relaxing at your parents’ home when you hear a knock on the door. Upon answering the door, you are met by police officers who arrest you, forcing you to go with them without explanation.

After a lengthy wait in a holding room, you are approached by a magistrate who informs you that you are being charged with capital murder. You have just been falsely accused. Anxious and scared, your mind becomes paralyzed, unable to process this information – this has to be a mistake, a horrible prank.

The truth is that falsely accused victims have indeed been pranked. Pranked by a system plagued by injustices such as eyewitness misidentification issues, racial intolerance and a politicized system that often leads to wrongful convictions.

This was the case for Anthony Graves, a man who believed in a criminal justice system that ultimately failed him at the worst possible time. Graves was arrested Aug. 22, 1992 and he was exonerated Oct. 29, 2010. Although he has been exonerated, the justice system robbed 18 years of his life, during which he missed nearly two decades of his mother’s life, his children’s lives, and his own life to be free in a country that pledges “…liberty and justice for all.”

The most common cause for wrongful convictions is eyewitness misidentification issues. Simply put, people, who often have trouble remembering details, are asked to identify or describe a suspect involved in a particular crime.

Poor policing procedures are partly to blame for faulty eyewitness accounts. Most departments use lineups, which are often biased. Sometimes, it is not even disclosed to witnesses, who feel pressured to choose a suspect, that the suspect may not even be a part of the lineup.  Another questionable technique that some departments use is suggestive questioning, in which they may show the witness a picture of a man in handcuffs and ask “did he commit the crime?”

In Graves’ case, no one witnessed the crime take place, and the only eyewitness account was from a night clerk who was hypnotized in order to give a description of one of the two black men she believed she saw carrying gas cans the night of the murders.

When did hypnosis become an acceptable identification method? Other faulty identification methods include voice matching, scent matching (in which a dog “sniffs” out the suspect), and body-part matching (attempting to match ears, lips, or other strange body parts to alleged suspects).

Another widely used, yet questionable method, is the use of polygraph, or lie detector, tests. Polygraph tests measure increases in an individual’s breathing rate, heart rate, blood pressure and perspiration, which are also symptoms of nervousness. It is difficult to detect if someone is nervous out of guilt or if he is nervous because he has just been falsely accused of committing a horrific crime.

Perhaps Graves’ number one mistake was being a black man in small town America – Somerville, Texas, to be exact. Texas was a Jim Crow state and these racial tensions still exist, especially in some of its smaller, rural areas. In fact, Graves’ case was moved to a larger county because of mounting tension in Somerville.

Black Americans only represent 12 percent of the U.S. population, yet make up more than over half of the U.S. prison population. In Texas, black men are seven times more likely than whites to go to prison.

Surely these numbers indicate blacks commit more crimes, right? Wrong. Studies by such groups as the Human Rights Watch and the Department of Health and Human Services found whites use more drugs than blacks, yet black males are sent to prison on drug-related charges 13 times more than white men. The reason – simple economics. Whites often have more money to afford better representation and more resources to conduct their “business” off the streets.

While on trial, Graves experienced the harsh realities of racial injustice. In the United States, individuals are supposed to experience a trial by peers. In Graves’ case, there was only one black member on the jury, which may not have been an accident. A study of felony cases in Dallas County found that blacks were “systematically excluded” from juries.

Juries are made up of people, who, unfortunately, are prone to biases based off of their own values, beliefs and prejudices. When people are selected to join a jury, these beliefs often follow them into the courtroom, especially when the suspect is of another race. What is the result? Verdicts based off of the color of one’s skin instead of the facts of the case.

Although there was no physical evidence or motive to reasonably charge Graves, it took the jury less than two hours to choose his fate – death. The one witness who could have spared his life refused to testify because, as a white woman, she did not want her parents or the community to know she was involved with Graves’ brother, a black man.

Another flaw in the system is that it is politicized, which may drive some district attorneys to focus on winning cases without regard to the defendant’s fate, just to boost their “numbers” for election purposes. It also does not help that public defenders are underpaid, overworked or simply uninterested in challenging the current system.

However, before we point our pitch forks toward seemingly “corrupt” district attorneys or “lazy” public defenders, we must understand that these individuals are a reflection of society at large. As a society, we want to hear that the bad guys are locked up, never to threaten our precious society again; therefore, we do not question the current system.

It is up to us to hold ourselves and those we put into power accountable. We can take action by writing to Congress to reform eyewitness identification procedures to exclude unreliable scientific methods. We can demand reform for jury selection to increase juror diversity. We can demand that suspects who proclaim their innocence be given post-conviction DNA testing. We can demand that interrogations are recorded and kept on file. We can work with organizations like the Innocence Project to help overturn wrongful convictions.

Racial intolerance, eyewitness misidentification and a politicized system are to blame for our failing justice system. Ironically, all of these issues call into question our own character and values as a society. Who are we to let our justice system crumble to the point where innocent people are sent away for life…or even put to death?