Your Sentence: ‘Life on Death Row’, a Terrifying Price to Pay For a Crime of Which You Are Innocent
Years later, justice lawyers stumble on your case, find inaccuracies, demand a retrial, and you’re acquitted. Discover the man who fights tooth and nail for justice…
It’s something that has always bothered me…that one person, or a group of people, can make a judgement on another person’s guilt and therefore on how their life might pan out thereafter.
As a young girl I’d argue the toss with my dad. ‘But how can they REALLY know?’ I’d ask.
My father would agree that there was always room for doubt. DNA analysis had not even been thought about in those days, let alone used.
So many people we now know, have wrongfully been put to death. Unfortunately we can’t bring them back to apologize, to tell them we stuffed up, to make atonement.
It would be great to think that, with the technology we now have at our disposal, we would never make such errors again, but can we ever be really sure?
The reality is there are people languishing in prison right now, who have been trapped because of a system they know little of. One woman was tricked, by her legal team into taking a plea bargain, ‘an arrangement between prosecutor and defendant whereby the defendant pleads guilty to a lesser charge in exchange for a more lenient sentence or an agreement to drop other charges.’
What happened thereafter was that, in giving up her chance of a trial before a jury, she ended up getting a death sentence.
Meet lawyer, Justin Brooks
‘Justin Brooks has helped free 35 people from death penalties and life sentences — and has even been played in a film by Greg Kinnear. BBC News speaks to him on one of his visits to his Derbyshire holiday home to find out what drives him in his quest for justice.”
Justin became interested to know more about this woman and why she had taken the plea bargain.
“As a young American law professor, Justin Brooks was reading a newspaper one day while preparing for a class in Michigan when a story caught his attention.
“It was a report about 21-year-old Marilyn Mulero who had been sentenced to death for a double murder in Chicago after her legal team had encouraged her to take a plea bargain and give up her chance of a trial before a jury.
“Justin became interested to know more about the woman and why she had taken the plea bargain.
“She gave up the right to a trial with a plea bargain and got a death sentence,” said the 56-year-old criminal defence lawyer and law professor.
“I went to meet her and she told me she was innocent so I went back to the law students I was teaching and said ‘Who wants to help me investigate this case?’ and four students raised their hands.”
Their research began, not in a comfortably-plush legal office, but around Justin’s kitchen table where the team found worrying inaccuracies, and some unfairness in how the woman’s case had been dealt with.
One thing they found out was that she had been interrogated for some fourteen hours. Even the most stalwart among us would succumb under such a brutal set up.
And then some incredibly simple procedures had been totally overlooked, the failure, for instance, for the lawyers to even check out the scene of the crime in order to find evidence of guilt.
Instead they relied on highly-suspicious statements by supposed ‘witnesses’.
“When Justin himself visited the scene, he found a key witness had lied about being able to see what happened from her apartment window because the obstructions and angle of her home made that impossible.”
From where the key witness had said she was standing, Justin easily concluded that the women was lying. Too many things, including trees, made it impossible for the witness to be able to see anything.
Yet that had not been checked out.
Kind of makes you wonder…are we all subjected to the same law? I suspect not.
But whether you are rich or abjectly poor, the law is still the law and rules must, and should be followed.
And what about the innocent until proven guilty?
“He [the lawyer] did no investigation in the case,” said Justin.
“We found out the woman claiming to be a key witness had fabricated her story and was a girlfriend of one of the victims.
“I stood right where she said she was seeing the killing from on a bright, sunny day and I couldn’t see [the scene] and this shooting happened at night. There were trees blocking the view and a food van — it was impossible to see.
“If the lawyer had done a simple thing like that he would have known the witness was lying and the case would have fallen apart.”
Justin then took on the case from the woman’s original legal team and lodged an appeal.
It would be wonderful to report that Marilyn was released shortly after, when she did manage to stand before the court, and a jury, and plead her case.
Sadly, for the poor, the wheels of justice turn depressingly slowly.
Justin stated that he took this case on when he was a young lawyer. “I started the case when I was 29 and it finished when I was 55.”
Justin’s legal helpers are also now middle-aged men.
Can you even begin to understand the raw emotion of winning a case some 26 years after taking it on?
Sure, it’s a success story, all because of the tenacity of lawyers bent on justice.
But there is no way that this can now be seen as fair. A young 21-year-old spends more than half her life in prison for a crime of which she was innocent, and in the process she loses her family.
Those years can never be reclaimed.
Everything that was important to her, family and youth, taken in the moment by a careless and uncaring judiciary.
“That case and others like it inspired Justin to co-found the California Innocence Project, a non-profit organisation which relies on funding and donations to keep running.
“He works together with nine full-time legal staff and 100 volunteers to help free people who have been wrongfully convicted, particularly those who spend decades behind bars.”
If you are reading this and thinking that the law can still be an ass, you are surely not alone.
If you are disturbed about the very notion that, once a prisoner is found guilty, it’s crickets for them, once again, there would be many people reading this, feeling totally alarmed about a system that is broken at best, and even more worrying, corrupt.
This is not to infer that the system is corrupt. But there are parts that need a darned good polish, even just an airing and revisit of long-held cases, to ensure that justice is served, regardless of wealth or otherwise.
What are your thoughts? Do you feel our justice system is fair?
Or are you a little as I am. Having read so many of John Grisham’s books, almost all of them based on true stories, and cases he was personally involved in, wondering what needs to be done?
Please leave a comment below. Your ideas mean much to me.
