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Weird stuff!
Over the weekend, Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced the arrest of 51-year-old Albert Johnson, for the brutal rape and murder of two three-year-old girls in the 1990s. Johnson was an early suspect in both cases, but despite the fact that the state had samples of his DNA on file for over a decade, it never bothered to test it against the DNA found in the little girls.
Why?
Well, largely because Mississippi District Attorney Forrest Allgood (like Mike Nifong, a Democrat) decided early on in both cases that he had his men, and he couldn’t be convinced otherwise. One of those men was Kennedy Brewer (pictured above), a mentally handicapped man who, thanks to Allgood, served more than a decade on Mississippi's Death Row, then served another five years even after DNA evidence had cleared him!
Allgood insisted on retrying Brewer anyway, arguing that bite marks on the little girl's body matched Brewer's teeth.
Stranger still, Allgood refused to test the DNA from the crime scene against that of a man (Albert Johnson) he’d earlier convicted of an eerily similar crime — another rape-murder of a young girl in the same area. It now seems clear why Allgood resisted the test. As it turns out, the man he'd convicted for that crime, Levon Brooks, is innocent, too. Brooks had been sentenced to life in prison.
Hood is expected to announce on Thursday that Brewer has been completely exonerated.
Had Allgood not fixated on Brooks after the first murder, he may have been able to prevent the second. Instead, we have two little girls dead, one man wrongly incarcerated for nearly two decades, and another who came perilously close to execution. And of course, there's also the matter of a two-time child rapist and murderer running free for 15 years.
OK, Forrest Allgood is even worse than Mike Nifong, same malfeasance, but an even more horrific result!
Glad to see that, in your case, c"onservative" does not equal "so reflexively law and order that I take the government's side on any issue involving the criminal justice system"! Having a fair and accurate system of criminal justice is not a liberal or conservative value... (I always thought it was weird for so many conservatives to be so one-sidedly "tough on crime" anyway, as they generally, in every other context, are quite skeptical of excessive government power, government motives, and government competence...)
ReplyDelete"Glad to see that, in your case, c"onservative" does not equal "so reflexively law and order that I take the government's side on any issue involving the criminal justice system"!" (anonymous)
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Absolutely There are both mistakes and outright malfeasance on BOTH sides of the fence and when government officials abuse their authority, that's the WORST kind of calumny.
DA's like Nifong, Brooklyn's former DA Holtzman and others have abused their offices numerous times.
That said, we can't reflexively support "the rights of the accused" either, as the ACLU and others routinely do.
Too often, misguided lawyers try to gin up sympathy for rapists, pedophiles and murders, often resorting to putting their victims on trial.
DNA samples should be mandated from ALL criminal suspects with the caveat that the DA MUST follow wherever THAT evidence leads....EXCEPT in rare cases, like the one of the physician who'd implanted a patch of someone else's blood under his arm to throw off investigators. On the second go-round, his ruse fell apart. THAT guy should be given life without parole just for being an asshole.
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"Having a fair and accurate system of criminal justice is not a liberal or conservative value..." (anoymous)
Absolutely right.
A WORKING, efficient and well-run criminal justice system is what's needed.
"Justice" run amok is injustice.
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"I always thought it was weird for so many conservatives to be so one-sidedly "tough on crime" anyway, as they generally, in every other context, are quite skeptical of excessive government power, government motives, and government competence..." (anonymous)
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Well, actually Libertarians tend to have more issues with that than do Conservatives, but I get your point AND it may look like a conundrum, BUT, the recent global credit crisis prettty much vindicates that view...to this extent - Greenspan and his two main acolytes (Larry Summers and Robert Rubin...HELLOOO still here on the current administration's economic team) all opposed ANY oversight of the derivatives market by the CFTC and took the teeth out of the SEC.
Conservatives believe there is a HUGE difference between excessive regulation that closes off the market to new ideas and new competitors and ENFORCEMENT....Conservatives WANT vigorous enforcement of all existing laws, criminal, civil and fiduciary.
Sadly, some ardent Libertarians do not.
Conversely, what I've always noticed is how so many anti-death penalty advocates (I, as you might expect, support the death penalty for specific heinous crimes) seem to have very little trouble with the fact that we DO have a death penalty here in the USA, overwhelmingly meted out on the streets by thugs, often in the most inhumane ways and under the most barbarous of conditions.
A much fiercer and final approach to punishing such degenerates SHOULD be the approach of those who TRULY want to end the "mindless slaughter" of innocents, in my view.
Thanks for the thought-provoking response.