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Someone
once told me that if they ever have any reason to appear before
any court of judge, they didn’t want justice, they wanted mercy.
After hearing of several instances this week, I am certain I tend
to agree with him and his viewpoint. Try this one on for size.
We all have seen situations where men have been locked up in prisons
for any number of years only to be determined to be innocent after
DNA testing had been completed. Obviously DNA didn’t exist twenty
five years ago so it was certainly possible for some poor schmuck
to be tried and convicted and sent off to the pokey for many years
to come. Now, he gets his case reviewed and the evidence shows that
he could not have been involved in the crime and he gets set free.
But wait, what
about those lost years away from his family, job and friends? Well,
in some states the innocent guy gets some form of restitution and
in other states he has to sue for it. In the majority of either
cases the chances of his getting any real money is fairly slim.
The states tend to appeal any ruling against them and by the time
the guy does collect, more years will have passed and his attorney
will probably get more than he’ll ever see. Looks to me like we
should have some sort of uniformity to this matter. I’m not saying
we should give each and every guy a million bucks, but let’s be
reasonable. If the innocent guy was capable of making say, $35,000
a year and he got locked up by mistake for twenty years, then why
shouldn’t he be entitled to a lump sum of $700,000 for his pain
and suffering?
At the same time, why have any appeal for the state? This should
be a slam dunk. He is the wrong guy, the state owes the money, and
he gets the money within six months of his release, simple as that.
No attorneys needed, he gets the money to help him get on with his
new life. Why make the guys suffer any more because of damage done
to him for whatever reason. Juries make mistakes, the police make
mistakes, and the courts make mistakes. We can’t undo what has been
done to some guy who has sat out the last fifteen or twenty years
in some tiny cell with a bunkmate named Bruno. We are the state
and if we made a mistake, then the least we can do is try and correct
what we did as quickly as we can.
My second bone of contention this week concerns what happens to
drivers who run red lights or stop signs and kill someone. In our
state, the practice is not to test the person committing the traffic
violation to any drug or alcohol test if they don’t seem to be impaired,
even though they might have ran a light or stop sign and killed
anyone. It was reported to me that we do test (by autopsy) the victims.
This makes no sense to me at all. Apparently all anyone can be charged
with if they run a light or stop sign and kill someone is a traffic
violation; no criminal charges can be made against them.
Sure it was an accident, but let’s get real, a lot of people don’t
show any signs of drug or alcohol abuse so why not test any and
all drivers involved in a fatal accident? And while we’re at it,
why not have some type of additional charge that could be brought
against the driver who committed the accident in the first place?
I realize anyone could have an accident, but killing one or more
people is serious and there should be consequences for our actions.
Just allowing the person to get off with a citation and pay a fine
seems to me an awfully cheap price to pay for someone’s father,
mother, brother, sister, son or daughter.
It appears
to me that our various state legislatures should be looking into
the elimination of issues such as these and stop clowning around
for the media or passing inane resolutions or laws without any merit.
But then that’s just my opinion.
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