Let’s be optimistic and say humanity has a future. In the future, people are going to look back at the US criminal justice system with shock and horror like we look back at slavery or the people grinning in pictures of lynchings.
And the horror won’t be limited to the primary perpetrators, but to everyone who complacently took it as a necessary status quo.
Look at this:
Man Locked Up for 18 Years After Police Showed Wrong Photo, Prosecutors Say
The Brooklyn district attorney says a deceptive photo lineup helped imprison Sheldon Thomas for a killing he did not commit. He is to appear in court on Thursday.
For nearly 20 years, one photograph stood between Sheldon Thomas and freedom.
It was a picture of the wrong Sheldon Thomas.
In 2004, police officers showed the image of a young Black man to a witness, who chose him from an array of six as a suspect in a fatal shooting in Brooklyn’s East Flatbush neighborhood. That identification withstood scrutiny through an indictment, trial and appeals over more than 18 years.
But now, the Brooklyn district attorney’s office is saying that detectives, prosecutors and the original trial’s judge knew from the outset that the photo in the array wasn’t actually of the man they wanted to arrest, but they proceeded anyway.
In a new report from the Brooklyn district attorney’s conviction review unit provided to The Times, prosecutors said that the two men shared a name, and they had addresses in the same precinct, but police investigators knew early on that they were different people.
Mr. Thomas, 35, is scheduled to appear in court on Thursday afternoon before Matthew J. D’Emic, a judge with the Brooklyn Supreme Court. The district attorney’s office said in its report that the conviction should be vacated.
The case was “compromised from the very start by grave errors and lack of probable cause to arrest Mr. Thomas,” District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.
“He was further deprived of his due process rights when the prosecution proceeded even after the erroneous identification came to light,” Mr. Gonzalez said, calling the conviction “fundamentally unfair.”
Attorneys for Mr. Thomas declined to comment before the hearing.
The case would be the 34th conviction vacated after re-investigations by the unit, which was expanded in 2014, and shows what can happen when checks in the criminal justice system break down.
The prosecutor’s office said that the man in the photo array and Mr. Thomas do not look alike, despite the assertions by police investigators, government lawyers, the trial judge and an appellate panel.
The New York Times story is far from the front page. It’s below a boring story about the fucking deficit, Mitch McConnell tripping, and a post about Phantom of the Opera.
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