...a nighttime encounter with two strangers in San Jose led to his arrest for attempted murder. Johnson insisted he was defending himself and had done nothing wrong. But at 26, he was sent to solitary immediately after he was booked into the jail to await trial....While Johnson was being held, he witnessed fellow inmates being beaten by guards and was beaten himself, according to a lawsuit he filed in 2018 alleging his civil rights were violated. From his tiny, barren cell, he listened to the cries of a mentally ill inmate as he was pummeled by three sheriff’s deputies, who were later tried and convicted in the man’s death.Prosecutors offered Johnson a lesser sentence in exchange for a guilty plea, but he refused to accept a deal.“My frustration with my case will not allow me to consent to a lie,” Johnson wrote his mother in a Nov. 15, 2016, letter. “I am a warrior until my death and I must stand [up] to injustice no matter how dismal the odds.”It would take three years — almost half of it in solitary — before Johnson got the chance to testify in his own defense. It would take just two hours for a jury to acquit him.
This story is almost a litany of everything wrong with our criminal justice system. The author focuses especially on the brutality of solitary confinement as a practice -- pre-trial, even, while one is 'presumed innocent' -- but many other bad things are illuminated as well. The practice of using threats of severe prosecution coupled with pre-trial confinement to force a plea bargain on an innocent man is unethical. It might even be unethical aimed at a guilty man.
6 comments:
The practice of using threats of severe prosecution coupled with pre-trial confinement to force a plea bargain on an innocent man is unethical. It might even be unethical aimed at a guilty man.
Pre-trial, there is no such thing as a guilty man, no matter how damaging the publicly available data might seem. The practice is always unethical, at best.
Eric Hines
Yes, in the legal sense that is true. I had meant it in the factual sense: even if we know for a fact that you did it, got you on camera, and have ironclad evidence, it's probably still unethical to hold you for three years in solitary while trying to extort a plea bargain. This is especially true if you're being overcharged should you go to trial -- attempted murder on a self-defense case, as if you'd planned to kill somebody that day! -- in addition to being subjected to abusive confinement.
There's guilty and there's guilty, too. Jury nullification is all about "yes, he did it, but he's not guilty of a crime."
Eric Hines
Solitary confinement is no joke. We could only use "involuntary seclusion" for 48 hours, at which point they had to be at least tried outside the room, even if we knew it wouldn't last an hour because the person was so out-of-control. Even then, you had to be checked a minimum of every fifteen minutes and interviewed by a professional every two hours. When we had someone secluded for over a week it required a discussion at the highest levels, both medically and legally.
To have reduced human contact is hellish. To use it as a persuader should be extremely hard to justify.
Solitary confinement is a form of torture.
The old wisdom about never letting yourself be taken to a secondary crime scene, no matter what, applies just as well to a system that is acting in a criminal manner.
That's a tough story to read. The damage that series of events has done to him is severe. He's virtually renounced the country he fought for. And all this in Santa Clara- the county with the highest GDP in the nation (third highest in the world), home to so many lefties who think they fight for the downtrodden and minorities- and yet tolerate this right under their own noses, and done in their names. There's a lesson to be learned there, but I doubt anyone in a position to do anything about it will.
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