Roman's case is similar to that of another wrongfully convicted defendant in Connecticut, James Tillman.
The Tillman and Roman cases have disturbing similarities. Both men are members of minority groups, Tillman being black, Roman Hispanic. Both were ordinary working-class men, not professionals, men about whom it might have been easier for a jury to believe the worst.
This obnoxious Washington Times editorial makes an argument favored by death penalty supporters: there's no reason not to kill the five men on Maryland's death row because they're really guilty. We know this because they've been on death row for a long time. Of course, Tillman and Roman were thought to be guilty during the decades they rotted in prison until new evidence proved otherwise. The Washington Times' unwavering belief in the sanctity of guilty verdicts is unsupported by the reality of wrongful convictions.
Constitutions guarantee the right to trial by jury not because juries are considered infallible but because they are considered less likely to submit to government's tyrannical impulses. The prejudicial impulses of individual jurors are something else. So is carelessness — a juror's indifferent standard of reasonable doubt.
Connecticut needs to find out what went wrong in the prosecutions of Roman and Tillman.
[T]he Tillman and Roman cases should be investigated in detail, by or under the supervision of the General Assembly's Judiciary Committee, with transcripts studied and all the major participants interviewed, and with conclusions drawn and published for the criminal-justice system, the legislature and the governor, and the public to evaluate. Police and prosecutors may not be enthusiastic about such an undertaking but the damage to the system's credibility already has been done and it can be repaired only by a manifested desire to learn from these mistakes, if indeed anything can be learned.
One thing everyone needs to learn is evident from these stories: police and prosecutors routinely make mistakes, and citizens should be skeptical whenever they consider "proof" of a defendant's guilt.
