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FRAMED: INNOCENTS IN U.S. PRISONS  
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Walter G. Moss
November 17, 2024
LA Progressive
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_ Our problem with “innocents in U. S. prisons” shows more signs
of increasing rather than diminishing. _

, Photo by Karsten Winegeart

 

Here in the USA we like to consider ourselves, as Ronald Reagan said
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his 1989 Farewell Address to the Nation, “the shining city upon a
hill. . . . God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living
in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce
and creativity.”

But in some ways, we are not a beacon of freedom and democracy, and
one of them relates to our criminal justice system. One Internet
site noted
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others have also indicated: that the differences “between the
European and American penal systems were astounding. Germany and the
Netherlands [for example] incarcerate one-tenth the rate of the U.S.,
where sentencing time is considerably longer.” There is also the
racial element in our system. To cite just one statistic, in
2021 Blacks were imprisoned at a rate about five times that of Whites
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Just last month a book appeared co-authored by one of our best-selling
authors, John Grisham, and it highlighted another defect in our prison
system. Its title? _Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful
Convictions_. Grisham’s co-author is Jim McCloskey, who in 1983
founded Centurion Ministries, which by late 2019 had secured the
release of 63 wrongly convicted persons in the the USA and Canada.
In _Framed_, each author wrote about five “framed” cases, and in
his portion of the book’s preface McCloskey wrote, “The
twenty-three defendants caught in the web of these ten wrongful
convictions needlessly spent decades in prison until the truth of
their innocence finally emerged and set them free. Four landed on
death row, two of whom came within days of execution, while one was
tragically executed.”

He then added, “These convictions were not caused by unintentional
mistakes by local law enforcement or misidentification by well-meaning
eyewitnesses or honest but erroneous forensic analysis. No, they were
rooted in law enforcement misconduct and chicanery, men and women
hell-bent on clearing cases or gaining a conviction through a wide
variety of illicit means—subornation of perjury, secret deals with
criminals in exchange for their fabricated testimony, coercing
witnesses into false testimony or suspects to falsely confess, use of
discredited or inept forensic analysts, suppression of exculpatory
evidence from the defense, or other acts that obstructed justice and
resulted in the ruination of innocent lives to the relief of the
actual perpetrators.”

Another recent (Sept. 2024) book that highlighted wrongful convictions
is Dan Slepian’s _The Sing Sing Files: One Journalist, Six Innocent
Men, and a Twenty-Year Fight for Justice_. Slepian is a producer of
reports and podcasts for "Dateline NBC," and he has been examining
such convictions for a few decades.

In a recent interview
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explained how he got interested in the subject: “I grew up believing
that the justice system worked just the way it should. . . . [but in
later years] I was able to see a justice system that I never knew
existed, a very dark and ugly underbelly that is really how the system
often works.” He recognizes that his initiation to this
“underbelly” was a New York case that involved the murder
on Thanksgiving
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1990 at the Palladium nightclub. As he later heard about it from a
detective, two Hispanics, David Lemus and Olmedo Hidalgo, were charged
with the crime and spent 15 years in prison before one of Slepian’s
programs aired in 2005. It helped lead to a judge overturning the
conviction in 2005.

Slepian recognizes that “racism and corruption are part” of the
wrongful-conviction problem, but also has observed that there are
additional causes. In the twenty-first century, his book tells us, he
has 

witnessed the American criminal justice system from every perspective.
I’ve been embedded with detectives, prosecutors, and defense
attorneys and followed them and their cases for months, sometimes
years. I’ve interviewed countless murderers, judges, and jurors.
I’ve gotten to know many victims of crime and have come to
understand the devastating impact it has on them and their families.
I’ve spent several hundred days inside prisons across the United
States with the wardens who run them, with convicted killers sentenced
to death, and with the corrections officers who walk those dangerous
tiers every day, hoping to go home unharmed. And I’ve toured prisons
in other countries. I even slept in a cell for two nights in
Louisiana’s Angola prison. . . . Proximity has taught me one
overwhelming truth: we have an undeniable crisis on our hands. There
are roughly two million Americans locked up, more than in any other
country, and our recidivism rates lead the world. . . . I’ve come to
see the inhumanity and irrationality of that system, and how its worst
aspects are revealed by the way it handles wrongful convictions.

Furthermore, he discovered “what false imprisonment means not only
for the individuals who are wrongly removed from society but also for
their parents, partners, and children. As tragic as these injustices
are for innocent people in prison, they have a cascading generational
impact on those around them and on society that is hard to measure.”

Regarding how many wrongful convictions there have been, Slepian
writes that “the number is staggering.” He suggests the total
number could be between 100,000 and 200,000, but only around
“thirty-five hundred people have been exonerated in the past thirty
years.” Why so few? Slepian explains that “the system . . .
isn’t built to get people out. It’s built to keep them in—even
when . . . there is clear evidence that they don’t belong there. . .
. even when some prosecutors are presented with irrefutable proof of
innocence, the default is resistance as opposed to curiosity or
concern.”

Besides Grisham, McCloskey, Centurion Ministries, and Slepian there
are others who have worked to free the wrongfully convicted. Slepian
mentions the Innocence Project, whose website states
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innocent people from prison.”There’s also the Equal Justice
Initiative [[link removed]], which
“challenges wrongful convictions and exposes the unjust
incarceration of innocent people that undermines the reliability of
our system.” And there’s the The Exoneration Project, whose
website proclaims, “We fight to free the wrongfully convicted,
exonerate the innocent, and bring justice to the justice system.”
(For a partial, but exhaustive and well researched, list of wrongful
convictions in the USA since 1805, readers can view Wikipedia’s
“List of Wrongful Convictions in the United States.”
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for a recent execution of a Black man, in September 2024, that may
have been innocent, see here
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Finally, regarding wrongful convictions, what does the future look
like? Unlike futurists, we historians have some certainty about the
past, but for the future we have only guess work. Yet with the
incoming Trump second term, matters don’t look good.

In his _The Sing Sing Files_, Slepian mentions our past—and now
future—president. Here are his exact words, “One of the biggest
stories back then had happened in 1989—the rape of a jogger in
Central Park. Five [Black] teenagers were arrested and paraded in
front of dozens of rolling cameras. The “Central Park Five”—or
the “Exonerated Five,” as they became known after their
convictions were vacated in 2002 [my bolding]—were described as a
group of “wilding teens” who brutally raped a woman and left her
for dead. Donald Trump ran an ad in Newsday calling for their
execution, headlined: “Bring Back the Death Penalty! Bring Back Our
Police!”

What is especially troubling is not only the call for “the death
penalty”—with Belarus (Russia’s ally) being “the only country
in the continent of Europe that still carries out the death penalty
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that the five convicted teens were innocent. And Trump’s rush to
judgment 35 years ago has gotten even intense at the present.

Putting aside the glee over his election manifested by the private
prison industry
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some prisons are run for profit—due to Trump’s plans for dealing
with illegal immigrants, we can instead look at some of his statements
for dealing with his political enemies.

Regarding former congresswoman Republican Liz Cheney, he posted
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2024: "She should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect
[referring to the House Jan. 6 select committee] committee." In
September, he threatened
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term prison sentences” for election officials and politicians who
“could cheat in the 2024 election.” In the same month about
Supreme Court critics he declared
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"These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges
and our justices, trying to get them to sway their vote, sway their
decision." (In November 2024, the Axios website posted
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“enemies within” that Trump hoped to jail, and the selection of
Rep. Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general just reinforced
the alarm that a President Trump might imprison innocent people,
guilty only of non-violently opposing him.)

In summary, our problem with “innocents in U. S. prisons” shows
more signs of increasing rather than diminishing. 

_WALTER G. MOSS is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern
Michigan University. He is the author of RUSSIA IN THE AGE OF
ALEXANDER II, TOLSTOY AND DOSTOEVSKY (2002
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For a list of all his recent books and online publications, including
many on Russian history and culture, go here
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* US Prisons
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* innocent victims
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* Police Frame-ups
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