Delbert Tibbs, Who Left Death Row and Fought Against It, Dies at 74

It is not easy:

you stand waiting for a train

or a bus that may never come

no friend drives by to catch a ride

cold, tired:

call yourself a poet

but work all day mopping floors and looking out for thieves.

Those lines, describing the experience of an innocent man on death row, are from a poem by Delbert Tibbs, who in 1974 was convicted in Florida of a rape and a murder that he had nothing to do with, it was later found. He spent nearly three years in prison before the State Supreme Court reversed his convictions, vacated his death sentence and freed him. 

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Getting It Wrong: Convicting the Innocent

How Eyewitnesses Can Send Innocents to Jail

When he recently signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois, Gov. Pat Quinn noted a "grave danger" that the innocent could be executed. This past March, the U.S. Supreme Court decided, in Skinner v. Switzer, to expand the right to access DNA testing that could potentially prove a defendant's innocence. Last week the New York Times published a firsthand account by John Thompson, an innocent man who came within hours of his own execution. Two weeks ago, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a $14 million jury award compensating him for the years he spent in prison. Public opinion surrounding the death penalty has been shaped, in recent years, by the possibility of innocents being executed. And DNA exonerations continue to regularly occur, although with little rigorous assessment of what went wrong.

In my new book, Convicting the Innocent, I conducted the first empirical study of the first 250 wrongful convictions brought to light by DNA tests in the United States. First, I located the original criminal trial materials from almost all of those innocent people's cases. I then reviewed those remarkable cases. My goal in revisiting those trials was to try to understand how the criminal justice system could make such fundamental errors. These 250 cases shed light on how not just death penalty cases (17 of the 250 were capital cases), but everyday criminal cases rely on unsound evidence and faulty investigative procedures. It's easy to blame innocent convictions on occasional human error. The high court suggested as much in its ruling in Osborne v. District Attorney's Office, denying an inmate's request for post-conviction DNA testing and saying that our criminal justice system, "like any human endeavor, cannot be perfect." But just because a system is a human one doesn't mean that we should casually assume that things must go wrong. My research shows systemic failures that can be prevented by using improved criminal procedures, subject of a multimedia website, a joint project with the Innocence Project, titled "Getting it Right,"to be launched soon, and with a segment on eyewitness misidentifications which has just been launched.

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Will Proof That Texas Executed an Innocent Man Change People's Minds On the Death Penalty?

Posted by Suzanne Ito, Blog of Rights at 2:00 PM on September 7, 2009.

Cameron Todd Willingham's last words were: "I have been persecuted 12 years for something I didn't do."

Cameron Todd Willingham's last words were: "I have been persecuted 12 years for something I didn't do." And now, five years after he was executed by the state of Texas, Willingham is probably as close to an exoneration as he’ll ever get. The blogs and news media have been filled with commentary about the revelation that Willingham was most likely innocent when he was executed, and it’s renewing calls for an examination of the death penalty in this country.

In The Hill blog, John Feehery writes:

Without getting into all of the facts in this particular case, it is clear that we live with an imperfect justice system. The system makes mistakes. Wrong people are accused and convicted. Witnesses sometimes misremember the facts, and sometimes they lie for their own self-interest. Sometimes cops make mistakes, and sometimes prosecutors reach the wrong conclusions.

But the death penalty, when carried out, is always perfect. It always kills the target, and kills the target permanently. And once you kill the accused, you can’t really turn back the clock. If the system turns out to be wrong, as it does on occasion, saying you are sorry doesn’t do much good.

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Madoff Scandal Threatens Country’s Criminal Justice Organizations

Posted by Dan Slater

Tallying the losers in the Madoff scandal has become somewhat of a parlor game. On the legal front, we’ve seen the New York Law School emerge as an alleged victim. But the criminal justice system is reeling, as well.

Earlier this month, the JEHT Foundation — a major financial supporter of the Innocence Project in Texas, among others — announced it would shut its doors in January because its prime donors invested with Madoff. JEHT, according to this Business Week article, is a six-year-old New York City-based philanthropy focused on juvenile and criminal justice, human rights, and election reform.

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The fallout from the Madoff Ponzi Scheme gets weirder and weirder. BTW the geniuses running UofT's pension plan just reported that the plan lost 4 or 5 million dollars that was invested with Madoff. Tom