Criminal Records: Justice! What Justice?

The truth is out there if anyone would bother to look for it

I sit here thinking about the injustice that goes on in our society today. I’m sure that you and most other people in the “civilised” world, assume that society investigates crimes to determine the truth. The guilty get punished and the innocent go free.

I thought the same way until very recently when a friend was charged with a serious offence that, in my opinion, he did not commit. Yes there was evidence to consider him a suspect but certainly not enough evidence to prove beyond doubt that he was guilty of the crime.

Are the police more interested in the conviction that they are in the truth?

We all believed that the police and legal teams would work together to uncover the truth and that the defendant would be cleared of the charges against him.

Did this happen? No it did not. The police had no other suspects so they stopped looking for evidence that could have cleared his name. He had no alibi and no way of proving his innocence. The trial went ahead with no clear evidence that he was guilty or innocent.

You would have thought that with no clear evidence of guilt that the jury would return a not guilty verdict on the grounds that there was reasonable doubt. But no, they did exactly the opposite and they did it unanimously.

The jury does not always make the right decision

I believe that even the prosecution team was surprised at this verdict. They had made a complete mess of the evidence all along. Making up scenarios that suggested guilt but were complete fiction.

This innocent man is now doing a long custodial sentence and his name will be tarnished forever. He has been condemned to a lifetime of low paid jobs and public disgrace.

There needs to be a change in the justice system. We will never be able to call ourselves a civilized society until our justice system becomes more interested in finding the ruth than it is about due process and makeing someone pay even if it is the wrong person. Lets not forget also that the real guilty person is still out there, potentially committing crimes. No one is looking for the real criminal.

There are more innocent people in prison than you might think

Since this case came to court I have learned that convicting innocent people has become, or still is, far more common than you could ever imagine. You don’t have to go far to fnd accounts of many alleged crimes where the evidence just does not make sense to convict someone and yet they were.

It seems that the police will go to great lengths to secure evidence that will point to a conviction at the expense of evidence to the contrary.

The jury have an impossible job

In court, the prosecution’s job is to get that conviction, not to find the truth. The jury have an impossible job of making sense of biased and unreliable evidence with no training or expertise to help them do the job. Is it any wonder that they vote with their emotions rather than fact. They are more likely to convict someone because they don’t like them than they are to examine the factual evidence objectively.

You might want to think about this the next time you look up someone’s criminal record or arrest record. Not everyone that is arrested or even convicted, are guilty.

Author: Steve Gee