patrick.net

My dear friends the CBS News cast had an unforgettable and troubling last segment. It was about a man who spent 39 years in an Ohio prison for a murder that he did not commit. More troubling is that he avoided the electric chair only because a prior Ohio governor commuted the death sentences of several African American inmates on the grounds that African Americans were given a disproportionate number of death sentences. The horrible part of this is that this man was convicted of murder and sentenced to death based on an eyewitness identification of a man who was 12 years old in 1975. It came out in the CBS newscast that homicide detectives of the Cleveland Police Department had coached this young man to lie. What kind of awful criminal justice system do we have in this country? Elena made a comment about the Cleveland Police Department: "What kind of thrill does one get about killing an innocent man?"

#crime