Powerful book Blind Injustice Should Open Eyes to False Imprisonment
Whenever it is proven that an innocent person was wrongfully convicted, which is far more often than any of us would care to admit, we are quick to blame some evil authority figure. According to Mark Godsey, a former prosecutor who now heads the Ohio Innocence Project, there is no such sinister antagonist, only humans behaving like humans.
in his new book Blind Injustice, Godsey not only explains how wrongful convictions occur, but also provides some relatively simple and inexpensive ways to greatly reduce these tragic cases. Because he served for many years as a prosecutor in New York, Godsey has been able to empathize with the courts while also sympathizing with the victims of wrongful imprisonment.
Most people hear of someone like Ricky Jackson, who served almost 40 years in an Ohio prison for a crime he didn’t commit, and regret it for a few seconds without thinking that this transvestite could one day affect them too. However, more than two thousand convictions have been overturned by evidence such as DNA evidence since 1989.
The reasons for so many tragic miscarriages of justice are primarily psychological and political, according to the book. Prosecutors, along with judges and juries, are human beings and therefore prone to error.
Among such errors, Godsey contends, are blonde denial, blind bias, and blind memory, which are often the only alleged evidence a prosecutor uses in his effort to secure a conviction against the defendant. The book offers several tests, each of which I failed, to point out how unreliable those three concepts can be in determining truth.
Political factors also contribute to many false imprisonments, especially since many judges and prosecutors are elected officials. The public naturally wants to feel safe, so candidates who have reputations or agendas that more than not get the highest vote totals.
Therefore, the more convictions a prosecutor can rack up, the better his chances of keeping his job. Instead of asking how many innocent people he could have put in jail, society just asks if they were guilty or not.
Godsey, from his long service as a prosecutor in New York, understands these factors. There is tremendous pressure on legal authorities to deliver justice as quickly as possible to an unpatient public. Perhaps that is why everyone, not just law students and family members of victims of injustice, should read Blind Injustice.
Godsey models patience in both his content and writing style throughout this book. The innocent victims he and various state Innocence Projects have freed, of course, have no choice but to be patient as they spend years behind bars.
On the other hand, the prosecutors themselves need to have more patience, and that also leads directly to the public. We must fight the human desire for speedy justice in favor of protecting the innocent, relying on science rather than humans to determine guilt.