Another Wrongly Convicted Finally Freed

[Outta here]

False accusations do tarnish the process. It's important when these are discovered that every means judicially possible is employed to punish the scofflaws. The problem is they're often kids.

Yes. In my experience Tamarin, this is a very true statement. I've worked with youth for many years. When I was scheduling staff in a residential co-ed program, I always felt concern about placing men on night shift as these were the only shifts they'd be working alone. My concern wasn't for the kids. Most (yes, I know not all, but most) workers are carefully screened. My concerns was for the male staff's professional well being. One false charge, and their jobs would be jeopardized... at the very least an investigation and suspension of duties (and pay) would immediately follow an allegation of any kind of abuse. That's not even getting into the legal repercussions. Having no other staff to provide witness to the innocence of the staff, it would come down to word against word. And this is not a rare occurance. Kids are much smarter than we give them credit for, and this intelligence does not always come with a fully developed conscience. Problem is, once such a charge is leveled by a youth, the fear sets in after they figure out the consequences are real, and they are severe. That fear is often the factor that makes one adhere to the lie they initiated.

I did in fact work with a 13 year old gal that was in care due to allegations of abuse she made against her father. After putting her family through hell, and being in care for about five months, she finally recanted when she realized her father was actually facing jail time. She had 'learned how to manipulate the system and chose to do so when she decided that she didn't like her parents' rules anymore. She admitted as much. Why do kids do that? Because they can. :-| I really don't believe it's always due to some sort of trauma they may have incurred as young ones either. Kids often do stupid and thoughtless things - it's part of their psychological and emotional development.

Josephine, my thoughts on this were focusing on adolescents. I believe you were referring to much younger children in your post. I don't have alot of experience with the little ones, but I have seen one case. A three-year old was the victim. Her words, her actions could not have been fed to her by anyone. Waking up in the middle of the night, in the midst of a nightmare....clutching her groin area and crying owie owie owie... It was awful, it was stark and it was obvious that her trauma was real. gawd... I never want to hear or see something like that again.
I do agree though that it is extremely possible to manipulate a child to say and even believe falsehoods. Likewise, it's possible to manipulate their words and actions to infer something quite far from the truth. I would call that a different form of abuse, but abuse nonetheless.:-|

 

[Pangloss]

Well said Zan.

Pangloss

 

[Josephine]

Hey Pangloss...that website only deals with murder cases.

Zan...that little 3 year old girl...you didn't elaborate...did she accuse someone of molesting her or did she say she had a nightmare, what's the story?

I will concede that some youth may lie about being abused, but I believe that the majority of children who say they are being abused are actually being abused. And even those that lie, sometimes accuse the wrong person because they're afraid to mention the real molester. Not talking about allegations here, because I know that false allegations abound in society, but I wish we had actual statistics on those falsely convicted of Just molestation or rape of a child. I've tried government website and justice sites...any suggestions?

 

[Outta here]

Josephine, the story of the little girl is long and sad. To make it short, she was apprehended from her parents on suspicion of abuse. I don't know (or remember - this was almost 20 yrs ago) how or who discovered this situation going on. I became a person in her life when she was placed in the custody of a foster family, who were good friends of mine. I became the proverbial 'aunty' to her for a time. They had to leave town for a bit, and rather than place her with another strange family, they placed her with me temporarily (after I was screened) Of course I was told ahead of time that she was prone to nightmares, and I was already aware that she had other acting out behaviours. Wrapping this up, I will tell you that she was eventually returned to her mother, the father was charged. The mother was hostile to the whole situation however, due to having her child apprehended and we were not allowed to see her again. Of course there's much more to the story, but that's the gist of it.

I think it's probably easier to be sure when the kids are younger if there has been abuse. There are certain behaviours that are commonly known to be indicators that could never be replicated unless a child had been exposed to abuse. For one thing, they're often highly sexualized in their interactions with others. Since the early years are so formative, all contact with others is absorbed and mimicked as it is understood to be 'normal' to a child. The dissonance of such behavior in one still so innocent makes it rather easy to spot if one is aware of what to look for. I believe care providers, teachers etc are educated now to look for such signs.

Regarding links to info, I couldn't find much either, but I did stumble on this disturbing story
which brings a whole other nasty dimension to the issue of allegations of abuse.

btw Pangloss, sorry for derailing your thread.. kind of deviated away from the OP here eh? :-?

 

[gopher]

How many innocent people have been executed over the years?

Especially, how many innocent blacks were lynched even though no evidence was ever presented and no trial took place for alleged crimes that they were accused of.

 

[gopher]

But DNA testing has its limits when you consider how criminally racist cop Mark Fuhrmann laughingly admitted to planting and manufacturing evidence against blacks and Latins in Los Angeles.

 

[innocent]

Josephine: I've been helping people who claim to be wrongly accused of crimes for an awful long time. I tend to handle highly specialized cases, but it's obvious to me that you're missing a very crucial point. The government of any country cannot reasonably be expected to supply reliable statistical information about the number of people who've been wrongfully convicted of any specific type of crime because, generally speaking, the government has no way of working out such statistical information.

Some governments will of course have figures about the number of wrongfully convicted people who've been exonerated due to physical evidence such as DNA, but beyond that, governments just don't know.

 

[Ariadne]

What percentage of people that have been imprisoned in the United States have proven to be wrongly imprisoned?

 

[hermite]

Josephine hasn't been around for over a year now. So I wouldn't be waiting on a a reply.

 

[JLM]

What percentage of people that have been imprisoned in the United States have proven to be wrongly imprisoned?

I read somewhere fairly recently 12% but not sure if that referred to prison generally or death row.

 

[innocent]

What percentage of people that have been imprisoned in the United States have proven to be wrongly imprisoned?

A brief way to answer to your question would be for me to say: I don't know. I live in Canada and so far I've never even set foot in the US, but in my own personal experience I've very often found that the courts or the system often refuses to even look at even compelling evidence of innocence of criminally accused people or people who claim to have been wrongfully convicted and imprisoned.

I'm currently in the process of writing and researching a book which is intended to point out some of the details of how and why that happens with the sort of specialized cases I deal with.

Basically, I specialize in dealing with cases where the wrongly accused person has already managed to work out the pertinent details of how and why they ended up being wrongfully accused and wrongfully arrested, but I'm only talking about cases where the accused ends up looking guilty due to the bad reasoning or false memory of their accuser/s.

However, I'm pretty sure I'm right in saying that cases where the courts consider the an accused person to have been wrongly imprisoned in the US is well under 1%.

That figure may well look reassuring to some, but I have reason to believe that vast numbers of innocent people end up being wrongfully imprisoned all over the world.

What percentage of people that have been imprisoned in the United States have proven to be wrongly imprisoned?

If I really tried to give a reasonably full answer to your question, I'm guessing it would take at least 100 hours of my time. Different individuals and organizations have used various different rationales to compile statistics in attempts to provide the answer to your question. I came across information from one bunch of researchers on the web about a year ago, and if a remember correctly, they reckoned the answer was point zero, zero something percent.

I didn't try to memorize their figures because my area of research consists of trying to figure out why the courts and the police generally end up being so hostile to anyone who tries to put compelling evidence of innocence of accused people in front of the authorities.

According to my own research, an innocent person who is wrongly accused due to bad reasoning has roughly point zero, zero percent chance of winning at trial. Unfortunately the authorities slams anyone and everyone who puts forward this well established conclusion. Apparently most judges, cops and lawyers do not want to accept that my conclusions about such highly specialized cases is proven and correct.

I also want to point out that there's loads of other researchers who've come to the same conclusions as myself about innocent people who stand criminally accused due to the bad reasoning or faulty memory of their accusers.

Of course there are cases where innocent people end up behind bars due to the deliberate lies of their accusers, but I specialize in cases where the following formula applies: bad reasoning =wrongful accusations = wrongful convictions.

 

[taxslave]

A few years ago a friend of mine was accused by his motherinlaw of molesting his children. All of a sudden family services was on his doorstep. He had to move out of his own house and could only see his kids on supervised visits, had to post a bond and a bunch of other crap. When it finally came out that she did this out of spite with absolutely no evidence neither she nor the family services people were penalized in any way.

 

[innocent]

A few years ago a friend of mine was accused by his motherinlaw of molesting his children. All of a sudden family services was on his doorstep. He had to move out of his own house and could only see his kids on supervised visits, had to post a bond and a bunch of other crap. When it finally came out that she did this out of spite with absolutely no evidence neither she nor the family services people were penalized in any way.

You've presented the information as though the mother in law acted maliciously by deliberately lying to falsely accuse your friend. For all I know, it could well be that she lied deliberately, but the point I notice about the story is that it looks as like the system acted in a rather hostile way to compelling evidence (or testimony) of innocence.

Assuming you story is basically correct, then it doesn't look like justice to me and it doesn't look to me as though the actions of the court was technically legal either.

We deserve a better system than the one you described. I think we'll get it too if people like yourself keep on demanding fairness from the courts.

 

[shadowshiv]

Josephine hasn't been around for over a year now. So I wouldn't be waiting on a a reply.

Which is generally the case when a thread that hasn't been posted in for over three years is necroed back to life.

 

[JLM]

You've presented the information as though the mother in law acted maliciously by deliberately lying to falsely accuse your friend. For all I know, it could well be that she lied deliberately, but the point I notice about the story is that it looks as like the system acted in a rather hostile way to compelling evidence (or testimony) of innocence.

Assuming you story is basically correct, then it doesn't look like justice to me and it doesn't look to me as though the actions of the court was technically legal either.

We deserve a better system than the one you described. I think we'll get it too if people like yourself keep on demanding fairness from the courts.

\\

When a mother-in-law accuses a son - in - law of something, that should automatically establish the credibility level at 0.5 on a scale of 1-100.

 

[shadowshiv]

A few years ago a friend of mine was accused by his motherinlaw of molesting his children. All of a sudden family services was on his doorstep. He had to move out of his own house and could only see his kids on supervised visits, had to post a bond and a bunch of other crap. When it finally came out that she did this out of spite with absolutely no evidence neither she nor the family services people were penalized in any way.

It is a shame that the mother-in-law couldn't get the worst possible punishment given to her, which would be for her to lose the right to see her grandkids ever again.

 

[gopher]

What percentage of people that have been imprisoned in the United States have proven to be wrongly imprisoned?

We will never have an accurate determination of this because there have been tens of thousands wrongly convicted based on falsified or manufactured evidence. Many of these victims who were imprisoned have already died and no case will ever be opened to determine the truth or accuracy of any evidence used against them. And, as has been hinted above, some were victims of capital punishment.

''I feel bad for the falsely convicted. But I don't believe that people are out there making false accusations and getting someone convicted out of spite.''


When I as in law school we had a case of a man-hating woman who made false accusations of rape at least eight times all throughout the USA over a span of about 10 years. Many of these men spent years in prison for a crime they did not commit. This crime happens far more often than is generally thought in society and should be punished with great severity.

 

[JLM]

We will never have an accurate determination of this because there have been tens of thousands wrongly convicted based on falsified or manufactured evidence. Many of these victims who were imprisoned have already died and no case will ever be opened to determine the truth or accuracy of any evidence used against them. And, as has been hinted above, some were victims of capital punishment.

''I feel bad for the falsely convicted. But I don't believe that people are out there making false accusations and getting someone convicted out of spite.''


When I as in law school we had a case of a man-hating woman who made false accusations of rape at least eight times all throughout the USA over a span of about 10 years. Many of these men spent years in prison for a crime they did not commit. This crime happens far more often than is generally thought in society and should be punished with great severity.

That is a hard one to really put a figure on- sometimes people get improperly imprisoned for the specific misdemeanor they were charged with, but the judge knows they are up to some sort of mischief all the time anyway so it all kind of balances out in the long run, possibly even to the benefit of the accused.

 

[gopher]

''specific misdemeanor''

The 8 innocents charged by that man hating woman were convicted of a felony based on her word alone. I don't have more info as this was over 20 years ago. While people are charged with misdemeanors as well as felonies, something must be done to protect those innocents. After all, many innocents are put into prison and risked physical or sexual assault which goes unpunished. Imagine suffering such a fate when one is completely innocent.

 

[innocent]

''specific misdemeanor''

The 8 innocents charged by that man hating woman were convicted of a felony based on her word alone. I don't have more info as this was over 20 years ago. While people are charged with misdemeanors as well as felonies, something must be done to protect those innocents. After all, many innocents are put into prison and risked physical or sexual assault which goes unpunished. Imagine suffering such a fate when one is completely innocent.

It's not my intention to speak against your character regarding the point of view you've expressed, but I want to point out that judges, prosecutors and defense lawyers always seem to assume that when an individual is claiming to be wrongly accused, the accuser or the accused is telling lies.

My background consists of helping people who claim to be wrongly accused to defeat the bad advice of their own defence lawyer because defence lawyers in my experience are the real cause of wrongful convictions with the sort of cases that I take on.

As long as the courts and defence lawyers insist on assuming that wrongful accusers use deliberate lies, I'll be doing my bit to try to see to it that such idiotic judges and lawyers face serious jail time for criminal negligence.

Judges and lawyers almost always talk utter crap when they speak about the causes behind wrongful convictions.