Law Enforcement, Race and the Gun Culture – Part VIII

This is the ninth part in this series, if you count the Discussion post. I recommend that you read or re-read the earlier posts.

Part I is here, Part II is here, Part III is here, the Discussion is here, Part IV is here, Part V is here, Part VI is here and Part VII is here.

In Part VII, I focused on the excessive prison population, resulting from ever-longer sentences, the huge number of people, particularly of color, caught up in the drug wars, and both the human and financial costs resulting therefrom.

In earlier posts, I spent a great deal of my focus, on the denial of the right to trial by jury, a proper defense and the criminal behavior of many prosecuting offices in withholding exculpatory evidence. I spent relatively little time on the Supreme Court as a major miscreant in denying the accused a fair trial and in allowing proper remedies against the abuse of the criminal justice system.

I did mention the Supreme Court decision in CONNICK, DISTRICT ATTORNEY, ET AL. v. THOMPSON where the innocent defendant was convicted of murder and spent 14 years on death row as a result of the DA’s office withholding a crime lab report that exonerated him. A jury awarded one million dollars to the defendant (I million for each year served) but SCOTUS by the usual 5-4 vote decided that the 14 years wrongfully incarcerated entitled the victim to zilch. -0- Nothing.

And that is where the problem begins but doesn't end. There is good reason why the founders wrote in the 5^th amendment:

…nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself...

so as to prevent coerced confessions. But the amendment has been distorted to keep miscreants (particularly white collar affluent ones) from having to answer questions in court or even before investigative bodies. To be sure the danger of being held in contempt is, in a sense, a means to force an accused into answering questions under threat of contempt of court. But is that what the founders had in mind? Or did they try to prevent the use of the 3^rd degree, whether physical or mental, to extract confessions. I suggest the latter. But it is the latter that is so frequently used to extract confessions, and it is the latter that the courts have allowed, even though it has been shown again and again that such confessions are unreliable.

Thus the Innocence Project has found:

...in about 30% of DNA exoneration cases, innocent defendants made incriminating statements, delivered outright confessions or pled guilty.

These cases show that confessions are not always prompted by internal knowledge or actual guilt, but are sometimes motivated by external influences.

Since DNA evidence is more often than not available to prove the innocence of the convicted, it may be assumed that the number of innocent in our jails or on death row is much higher than 30%.

It is for that reason that the SCOTUS instituted the Miranda rule, which I suggest is entirely inadequate to prevent the large number of cases that result in convictions of the innocent from false confessions.

Thus what prompted me to address this issue came through a rather circuitous route. I refer the reader to my blog posts of October and November of 2013 entitled "The Supreme Court vs. the Constitution," "The Supreme Court vs. the Constitution (Discussion),"

and "The Supreme Court vs. the Constitution(Addendum)," where I reproduced a discussion of a book by that name by one Gerald Walpin, which resulted from my negative review of Walpin’s book, his response, and my reply, all of which can be found on the Amazon website (See here).

Fourteen months later, out of curiosity, I returned to the Amazon website to see what other reviews had been posted and found one written under the pseudonym RUTHEE, which among other things attacked the Supreme Court, not for the Gore decision, or the United decision, or the many other recent decisions of the court that ignored precedent and made decisions for blatantly political reasons, but for instituting the Miranda rule in 1966. See Miranda v. Arizona.

Allow me to share RUTHEE’s review with you here, and I will share my response, as it appears on the Amazon website, in my next post.

Both liberals and conservatives promote their ideologies by evoking America's most important document. (sic) the Constitution, but very few have read it, understand its intent and its impact on American civil life.

Gerald Walpin comes to the rescue with this indispensable book. In “The Supreme Court vs. The Constitution,” in elegant prose coupled with meticulous research, he demonstrates how justices have based critical decisions on politics and a desire to implement a particular agenda. In his own words: “You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand how Supreme court Justices have substituted their own elitist vision for constitutional guarantees that protect the average American’s security and values.”

One particular egregious example is the passage of the Miranda law. How many times have we seen a movie or a column on a criminal being told his “Miranda rights?” Have you wondered why violent criminals have these rights which exclude confessions from admissible evidence?

Gerald Walpin reminds us “…the primary function of government…is to render security to its subjects. And any mischief menacing that security demands a remedy commensurate with the evil.”

Until the Miranda Law, the Supreme Court held that a confession obtained while the defendant was in custody was admissible, without any specific required procedures, as long as evidence showed that it was freely given and not induced by fear or threats.

Nonetheless, in 1966 five justices, outvoted four colleagues, and in Miranda v. Arizona Supreme Court, ruled that persons in custody must, prior to interrogation, be clearly informed they have the right to remain silent, and that anything the person says will be used against that person in court. Failure to adhere to this will result in dismissal of the case even against hardened and dangerous criminals.

Gerald Walpin demonstrates how the law and its practice violates the intent of the Constitution and quotes Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, dissenting almost two decades later in 1985: “The failure of police to administer Miranda warnings does not mean that the statements received have actually been coerced’ and ”when the admission is not coerced, little justification exists for permitting the highly probative evidence of a voluntary confession to be irretrievable lost to the fact finder.”

This is one of the many gems in this book. There are many, many more.

Mr. Walpin has written many excellent columns on the debates in our judicial system- on Race and the Law and the Supreme Court, the misuse of the 14th Amendment to foster illegal immigration, New York's "stop and frisk" decision, NSA surveillance, to name a few.

The Supreme Court vs,(sic) The Constitution makes the debate about original intent and practice intelligible for non lawyers. It is highly recommended.

Comments, questions, or corrections are welcome, and will be responded to and distributed with attribution, unless the writer requests that he/she not be identified. However, please give your full name and the town and state in which you reside or have an office.