Combat Terror with a Criminal Justice Career
America has been under siege. We are bombarded with news of terror in our homes, workplaces, neighborhoods and schools. We lose sleep over it. We fear for our loved ones and we fear for ourselves. Still, we manage to go about our daily lives in the hope that this is the price we must pay for living in a free country.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. When it comes to the American criminal justice system, we are a nation at war. And the outcome of this battle is not yet clear. We should be thankful that we live in a country where people are not routinely being executed or tortured in public dungeons by our military and secret police. But we need to understand exactly who's winning and why it matters—regardless of whether we win or lose.
One place where Americans have been particularly cautious is our own workforce. There have been numerous attacks on workers even within the last decade. September 11, 2001 was clearly a shock to the US workforce. Physical security at US airports is still not where it needs to be and more stringent training is needed for employees. The lack of training combined with widespread security breaches that lead to additional attacks is a clear indication that we need to do more to protect our airports. The 2005 attack on London's transit system by suicide bombers resulted in 50 deaths and 700 injuries according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
The next attack came on April 16, 2013. At the Boston Marathon, two bombs exploded just seconds apart from one another. Three people were killed and nearly 300 were injured. In the days following the bombings, a police officer was shot dead in Massachusetts and in New York City, a pressure cooker bomb was defused in Times Square.
The US Department of Justice recently published a study (http:// www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/cvus08.pdf) that analyzed and rated the death penalty by states. This is a must read for anyone interested in protecting the American public. The study reported these findings:
• Eighteen states executed 28 prisoners from January 1, 2008, through September 30, 2011. In each of those 18 states, at least one prisoner was wrongfully convicted and later exonerated.
• As of December 1, 2011, there were 166 inmates on death row who have been exonerated since 1973 (the date of the first US Supreme Court ruling making capital punishment constitutional). The 156 exonerations that occurred since 1991 are nearly triple the number that occurred in the previous 22 years.
• The number of death-row exonerations that have occurred in the United States since 1973 is more than twice the number of inmates who were executed.
• Of the 176 exonerated death-row inmates, 48 had served 20 years or more before being exonerated. Nine had served 30 to 35 years, and 7 had served more than 35 years. One man was exonerated after serving 38 years on Florida's death row—just five weeks shy of his execution date. Eighty percent of all known exonerees committed murder, almost half before the age of 20, and 90% were male.
• There is no reliable evidence that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to crime.
• The exonerees were released because of prosecutorial misconduct in 36% of the cases and ineffective assistance of counsel in another 24%. Just 9% were freed because of actual innocence, a finding that received only 1% of the national media's attention.
These statistics are shocking and should cause us to question how America's legal system deals with crimes against its citizens. This is not limited to the United States, either—just yesterday, a Hungarian court released an innocent man who was convicted for murdering three people that he had nothing to do with.
In the United States, there is a growing movement that wants to abolish the death penalty. Twenty four states have abolished it since 1973. Maryland and Massachusetts are currently considering abolishing it entirely, as are many others across the country. This is incredibly exciting news for Americans who want to live in a country where people do not enjoy the same rights as criminals. But our abolition movement must stop at some point or else we will no longer be America's shining example of Democracy and Human Rights. The American people deserve better than what our legal system has been delivering them over the past several decades. With each passing day that we allow this practice continue, we lose more of our humanity and our founding principles.
There are many reasons why the US legal system is losing its moral authority. We need to change it and we need to change it now. This can be done in a variety of ways including:
• Revising our prison funding to ensure that inmates have access to free college education.
• Holding criminals accountable for their actions through proper sentencing and rehabilitation programs.
• Educating prisoners about capitalism, political theory and the foundations of Democracy so that they have an understanding of what it means to be a citizen, as well as the opportunity to become part of society after their release. By providing prisoners with an education, we are ensuring that they will never fall prey to organizations or methods which threaten our way of life again. In the United States, we are letting prisoners go without any sort of retribution after they have committed brutal crimes. No thinking person should ever have to wonder if their child or sibling could be victimized by a repeat criminal offender.
• We must demand that our legal system provide the public with transparency and accountability. We should never again allow prosecutors or police to hide behind "internal investigations", which is just a way of saying that no one will ever know what really happened and who did what. There are numerous cases where a defendant's guilt was established by "evidence" that was later proven to be false or tampered with in some manner. The recent case in Florida where a man was convicted of a crime that he did not commit should never happen again—and the only way to ensure this is through transparency and accountability.
• Abolishing the death penalty is an important step toward restoring the US legal system's moral authority. We must also ensure that our law enforcement officials are doing their jobs properly and we must ensure that every American is innocent until proven guilty. There can be no doubt that we need to get rid of "secret evidence", "secret courts" and other practices which are antithetical to Democracy.
Conclusion
The US legal system is failing us and it is failing itself. This undeniable fact does not make the process of reform any less necessary. We must take action to make improvements, to restore our legal system to its former glory, and to ensure that we as a nation never again allow our citizens to be victimized by criminals.
We must abolish the death penalty from our planet now! Please join me in calling for this change so that we can live in an America where human rights are a priority and justice reigns supreme! To find out more about abolishing the death penalty, please read up on this subject on The Death Penalty Project website at http://www.deathpenaltyproject.net/index.