Recent reading: the slippery slope of justice

There's a ghastly murder. A suspect is captured and tried. What outcome would upset you more? That s/he is guilty but set free? Or that s/he is innocent but convicted and sent to prison?

It's a very old question.

it is better and more satisfactory to acquit a thousand guilty persons than to put a single innocent man to death. —Maimonides

I would agree. However, my reading is that our institutions of justice -- our courts, justice departments, police departments -- favor the other view. Why else would so many innocent people be convicted, which only since DNA testing has come to light?

 WASHINGTON — More than 2,000 people who were falsely convicted of serious crimes have been exonerated in the United States in the past 23 years, according to a new archive compiled at two universities. (The Daily Record, May 21, 2012

That's about 100 a year. That's about two a week.

These questions came to mind as I read a book these past few days, a book I think is important.

 A Wilderness of Error: The Trials of Jeffrey MacDonald by Errol Morris

Morris is the documentary filmmaker who made The Thin Blue Line, which corrected another incidence of injustice. He finds the 1970 MacDonald case a harder nut to crack. I agree, however, with his conclusions:

We may never be able to prove with absolute certainty that Jeffrey MacDonald is innocent. But there are things we do know. We know that the trial was rigged in favor of the prosecution; that the CID, the FBI, and the Department of Justice pursued an unethical vendetta against Jeffrey MacDonald; that evidence was lost, misinterpreted, and willfully ignored. We know that Jeffrey MacDonald was railroaded.Read more at location 7776

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But I do know—like Michael Malley—that MacDonald should never have been convicted of these crimes. And that much of the evidence points to his factual innocence. I am repulsed by the fabrication of a case from incomplete knowledge, faulty analysis, and the suppression of evidence. Repulsed and disgusted. Whether MacDonald is innocent or guilty, the case is a terrible miscarriage of justice.

Morris makes a comprehensive case for this slanted uncertainty. I share it and am equally disgusted by the behavior of our institutions documented here. This book deserves a wider audience than it will probably get because, as Morris shows, the media itself became part of the prosecution, and for most folks this case was over and determined decades ago.

I can't imagine the horror that MacDonald -- whose arrogant personality often works against him -- must have experienced these long, long years in prison.