Life After a Wrongful Conviction

By TChris, Section Innocence Cases
Posted on Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 08:19:00 AM EST
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This is the life that too often follows a wrongful conviction:

"In Durham, I feel like I'm already labeled," [Erick] Daniels said. "You can be pardoned, get your record expunged, get compensated, but in some people's minds I'm always going to be guilty. If I'm stopped for anything, even driving 10 miles over the speed limit, I'll make the front page of the newspaper. I don't have room to be guilty of anything."

A casualty of Durham's criminal justice system at age 15 (years before lawyers for the Duke lacrosse players exposed its dysfunction), Erick Daniels did about 7 years of adult time for an armed robbery he didn't commit. A judge recognized his innocence and set him free in September, but by that time Daniels had served most of his sentence. Now Daniels lives with and cares for his disabled grandmother. He hopes to be hired for a $10-an-hour job that might also send him to community college.

Good luck and best wishes, Erick.

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Life After a Wrongful Conviction | 8 comments (8 topical)

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The New Minority (none / 0) (#1)
by NMvoiceofreason on Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 09:54:02 AM EST

11% to 18% of all Americans have spent time behind bars. They face an intransigent system, not aimed at their rehabilitation, but at getting them back behind bars for any reason as quickly as possible. Most of them will have lost wife/husband, house, job, car - some even will have lost all contact with their families and friends. 2/3rd or better of all sex offenders will re-offend, the rest of the population ranges between 10% and 33% recidivism.

In many states they will have undergone "civil death", the inability to vote, or even be heard in court. If lucky enough to be released early on probation or parole, they will face a system of paperwork and tracking their movements that would have made the Soviets proud. Then they will face getting a job in a crashed economy with the proud title "felon" on their record and resume.

Good luck and best wishes, Erick, indeed.

with regards to (none / 0) (#2)
by cpinva on Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 10:49:56 AM EST

the wrongfully convicted, what amazes me is that none of these people has tried to physically harm either the prosecutor, police or jury members that sent them to jail. i don't think i would be quite so forgiving. nope, i'm absolutely certain i wouldn't be, someone would have to pay their pound of flesh, literally.

i might be somewhat forgiving towards the jury, they're just (for the most part, anyway) following the rules. for the police and prosecutors, no sympathy.

The obvious (none / 0) (#3)
by JamesTX on Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 02:38:06 PM EST

is that the system must change. The Reaganites got their way. They got their chance. This is the end result, and the streets are no safer than they ever were. Now, we all just have fewer liberties, but nothing is any better overall. And there are grave injustices visited upon the innocent every day. The rate is increasing, and the perpetrators (law enforcement, prosecutors, and courts) are immune and not accountable for their crimes.

The conservative "git tuff" movement has built a failsafe, hermetically sealed barrier to separate the non-convicted form the convicted. The barrier is impenetrable. The system is rigged and booby trapped from within to be certain that dismantling of their legislation will take decades, if it is possible at all.

There is one solution conservatives didn't think of. They didn't foresee the day when the public would turn on them -- lose faith in them. The way to start to eliminate this injustice is to stop discriminating against people with records. The conservatives want those who are left in the safe ship of life to be afraid of those who have been cast overboard. Their efforts will fail if we just start tossing lifeboats to the those thrown overboard, and start helping them climb back on board. That is the only solution.

My exonerated former client (none / 0) (#4)
by Peter G on Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 03:16:37 PM EST

Nick Yarris, who served nearly 22 years, most of it on death row, for a Pennsylvania kidnap-rape-murder that DNA eventually proved he hadn't committed, felt exactly the same way. His melancholy musings on the subject now, five years later, are on his website.

DNA evidence (none / 0) (#6)
by diogenes on Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 11:03:38 PM EST

I always hear about DNA evidence getting people off of death row, but I don't hear so much about DNA evidence showing that someone who was executed was actually wrongfully convicted. Then there's Steven Avery in Wisconsin who got released by innocence project and got convicted of murder again.
Maybe Nick Yarris is a nice fellow without a trace of past or future criminality in him. In any case, good luck to him.


: Maybe (none / 0) (#7)
by Peter G on Mon Feb 02, 2009 at 12:12:06 AM EST

"Maybe Nick Yarris is a nice fellow without a trace of past or future criminality in him." Or maybe he isn't. Either way, he didn't commit the crimes for which he was sentenced to death, and for which the State of Pennsylvania was willing to take his life away, despite an unfair trial and slipshod appeals, if a miracle of science hadn't intervened to prove them wrong. Isn't that enough for you? If he was wrongly convicted and sentenced to death that would be ok if he wasn't also pure as the driven snow? If that's what you're suggesting, then I don't know what I could say in response to you. We don't share a common moral vocabulary.
The reason you don't hear about posthumous DNA exonerations is that prosecutors fight tooth and nail to prevent re-examination of the evidence of closed cases, or even destroy it to prevent re-examination. One of these days, there will be an exception, and I promise you'll hear about it here.

Best of Wishes, but... (none / 0) (#5)
by diogenes on Sun Feb 01, 2009 at 10:47:05 PM EST

At his trial prosecutors brought up Daniels' juvenile record and the fact that he had once been shot. His lawyer (wrongly) didn't fight this. However, the article I saw did not say what the juvenile record was. If Daniels had made it to 18, it might have been to prison or worse rather than to community college.
Psychiatrists will often say that they are bad at predicting future behavior but that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If you think this is discriminating against people with records, then you can get a competitive edge by hiring only convicted felons who others are stupidly not hiring and thus you can get a source of untapped qualified labor.

: diogenes, (none / 0) (#8)
by cpinva on Mon Feb 02, 2009 at 08:24:35 AM EST

you're either missing the point, or purposely ignoring it: people should not be convicted of crimes that they did not commit.
their past or future behaviour is irrelevant, which is why, for the most part, it's inadmissable as evidence: it has nothing to do with the issue at hand.
if the state, in my name, is going to imprison or execute someone, i would like to be reasonably certain they are actually guilty of the crime, regardless of their past actions.
i think that's kind of what the founding fathers had in mind.