Liberals Defend the Guilty to Protect the Innocent (1/14/06)
by Dean Hartwell
Columnist Jonah Goldberg recently scolded liberals for supporting people whom he thought were guilty, like Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs and Stanley “Tookie” Williams.[1] He misses the point. By supporting the rights of these and other individuals, we reduce the chance that innocent people will receive punishment.
Just as there is no perfect crime, there are no perfect verdicts, either. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. Fingerprints and blood can be planted. Even confessions are sometimes coerced.
Unscrupulous prosecutors and crooked judges can expedite the process of convicting an innocent person. Even with the constitutional protections provided for defendants such as the right against unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to remain silent when put into custodial interrogation and the right against being a witness against oneself, defendants often find themselves outflanked in the courtroom.
That leaves the public with a choice: would we rather see innocent people punished or guilty people go free? People like Goldberg apparently have no qualms about the possibility of punishing the innocent since he fails to mention that this situation actually happens. Let’s look at a real case.
Randall Dale Adams was convicted in Texas of murdering a police officer and sentenced to death in 1977. A judge scheduled his execution for May 1979. Just three days before the execution, United States Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, Jr. ordered a stay because of the way that jurors had been selected. Some prospective jurors who opposed the death penalty but who said they could follow Texas law were wrongly excluded.
Was Adams innocent? You be the judge:
Adams spent the afternoon of the murder riding around in a car driven by David Ray Harris. Harris dropped Adams off at his hotel. Later that night, the police pulled over that same car since it had no headlights on. The driver shot one of the police officers five times.
Harris later bragged to friends that he had “offed a pig.” Police approached him and asked him about his statements and he said he was only trying to impress friends. When the police confronted him with the results of a ballistics test which established a gun he stole as the murder weapon, he changed his story and implicated Adams.
The police then interrogated Adams and claimed he failed a polygraph test. They also misquoted Adams in a statement by saying that he had confessed to the crime. So they charged Adams, very possibly because he was old enough to be executed and Harris (16 at the time of the crime) was not.
The trial consisted of the introduction of the Adams statement, perjured testimony and a former chief of psychiatry for the Texas Department of Corrections, who testified that Adams would be dangerous unless executed. The jury quickly returned a guilty verdict and later a death sentence.
What eventually freed Adams was the evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. Adams, who entered prison in 1977, finally got his freedom in 1989.[2]
So Jonah Goldberg can complain all he wants to about liberals who support defendants that many believe to be guilty. Since we cannot say for sure who is guilty, it is important to support the rights of all people to fair trials and an appeals process. If the price of freeing a Randall Adams is to support the rights of a Tookie Williams, I will gladly pay it.