The guy in that story was in possession of both the murder weapon and a ring taken from the victim. He was exonerated because the prosecutor failed to disclose evidence of a blood stain on the victims clothing that wasn't a match for his. That failure can't be condoned. But it's also ridiculous to act like the police just grabbed some guy off the street that was obviously innocent.

That's what I said about understanding what the injustices really are. The challenge isn't as simple as what you're saying: "just don't charge innocent people." The challenge is getting prosecutors to give defendants their due process, even when the defendants have damning evidence against them, when they have criminal records, when they are caught up in shady circumstances.

I read an article the other day about a guy who was convicted of murdering a pizza delivery driver in front of his wife and kids. There were questions about whether he had been the one to shoot, but there is no doubt that he and his friends were in the process of robbing the driver when one of their party shot the driver.

As I understand things, if an innocent (?) party dies while you're committing a felony, you're officially guilty of murder. I assume armed robbery of a pizza delivery guy is a felony (?), so why would the question of who pulled the trigger come up?

I don't actually like the you're-guilty-of-murder-if-your-cocriminal-kills-someone rule, but that seems like exactly the sort of case it's intended to work with.

Yes, he was convicted of felony murder. The specific controversy was that he was sentenced to life imprisonment, despite being 16 at the time: http://rt.com/usa/aclu-pledges-help-without-parole-225.

Although, he was re-sentenced to a 30-60 year sentence with possibility of parole after a 2012 Supreme Court case: http://www.thealpenanews.com/page/content.detail/id/624360/N.... Big victory for criminal justice reformers. :-/

I have no problem believing what you are saying, but at least statistically, there must be exceptions.

Which is actually an interesting thing to consider when you are applying laws to millions of people.

(still, from where I sit, convincing people that prison should not be a hell pit is a much bigger win right now than sweating false convictions)

There is, of course, the whole bell curve of erroneous outcomes. But you can't know a priori who are the genuinely innocent people. The reason justice reform is so hard is because it's hard to get police and prosecutors to assiduously assure people's due process rights when the overwhelming percentage of people they deal with are bad people.

I think prosecutorial misconduct is absolutely unacceptable. But I can also see why it happens, without assuming that it could only happen if large numbers of prosecutors were evil people who would convict someone they knew was innocent just to inflate their quota.

Yeah, I'm not shaking my pitchfork, I guess I'm thinking there is an interesting discussion to be had about how you make a system that is probably pretty good 10 or 100 or 1000 times better.