This question is inspired by a 10+ year old movie. I won’t say which film in case you haven’t seen it.
Has anyone ever been convicted of a serious crime (e.g. murder). Thence, after the conviction, they discover that the crime was actually committed by by someone else. OK, the first conviction is overturned and the first accused guy goes free. The question is, has the 2nd guy ever been convicted? I would think that the first conviction would raise, “reasonable doubt”, regardless of the evidence against the 2nd accused.
What if new evidence, like DNA, freed one and pointed to the other? Why would the previous conviction bar the subsequent trial of a different defendant? I don’t see any problem, but then, IANAL
I don’t see why the 1st conviction would necessarily raise ‘reasonable doubt’ against the second accused person. 10 years is a long time for new evidence to surface or new technology to come around that can look at the old evidence differently. But I suppose if there’s nothing new, a good lawyer could come in and argue that the prosecution fucked up the first time, based on the same evidence, what makes them so sure this time.
Also, I know this isn’t what you’re looking for, but it’s the first thing I thought of when I saw the OP. When I was in college, two of my friends were outside the dorms smoking weed. A cop walked up to them and they tossed their pipe about 15 feet away. The cop saw it flying, but didn’t see who threw it. He picked it up, asked who’s it was. Neither confessed, so he gave them both possession of paraphernalia tickets. I still said that they should have fought it, one piece of paraphernalia shouldn’t be able to result in two possession tickets, but there you have it, one crime, two convictions.
It would depend on the crime. Usually there is some alternate charge they can (and do) do with. For instance, if you murder someone they’ll try you on murder as well as a host of other charges, just in case murder doesn’t bring in a guilty verdict, the others will.
So in the OP senerio it’d be easier if we had a definate crime. 'Cause in real life the guy might be convicted on Murder and conspiracy to murder, and illegal firearms, etc etc. And found guilty on all of them. So invalidating one of them MAY not cancel the others out
The case of David Milgaard is pretty much as described in the OP. Milgaard spent 22 years in prison before being released in 1992. Five years after he was released, DNA evidence exonerated Milgaard, and implicated another man, Larry Fisher. Fisher was convicted of the murder in 1999 (thirty years after the crime was committed), and is still in prison.
That’s exactly the example I was looking for. I wonder how the 2nd person was convicted. For example, if an eyewitness made a mistake the first time, how do we know they’re not making a mistake again? If the police tried to frame the first guy, how do we know they’re not trying again? In other words, what evidence could you believe if that same evidence convicted someone else. That would cast reasonable doubt in my mind.
DNA is only one piece of evidence. All it proves is proximity to the crime in time and place. It takes more than DNA to prove culpability.
John Grisham wrote a non-fiction book about the case of Ron Williamson:
Williamson and Dennis Fritz were convicted of murder, Williamson was sentenced to death and Fritz to life in prison. They were exonerated and released from prison 11 years later. Glen Gore, who had testified against them in the orginal trial, was ultimately convicted of the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.
The book is called “The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town”.
Well, we don’t really, but I don’t think we don’t know it more than we usually don’t know it, you know? That is, in *any *case, the police might be lying, the prosecutor twisting the evidence to support his case, the investigators make mistakes. I don’t know that it’s more likely because they convicted the wrong man before on the same charges. If anything, I’d think they’d be exceedingly careful when bringing the same charges up on a new defendant. Nothing looks worse in the newspapers than a *second *conviction and exoneration.
And there you go. Whether or not I’m right, there are people who think like me. Enough to form a jury with, a jury that’s not convinced that there’s reasonable doubt on this case simply because there should have been on that one. There might be reasonable doubt, sure, but it should be evaluated solely on the arguments and evidence presented this time.
Actually, in many rape cases, DNA is probative if you accept that a rape occurred at all. I mean, how the hell else did it get there?
In the Miller case, Fisher’s DNA was found on clothing; given that he was living in the neighborhood, got fingered by his wife, and already had served time for other rapes, his proven proximity to the crime was pretty damning.
Forget exonerating the first guy. When Steve LaTourette, (R-OH), was a prosecutor, a girl in his county was murdered and he brought two guys to trial and got convictions on each of them (before different juries) by portraying each of them as the one who inflicted the trauma.
:eek: How did the second one get convicted? Assuming that the two cases weren’t running at exactly the same time, with LaTourette nipping in and out of the two courtrooms, how could reasonable doubt not exist if there was already someone convicted of the crime (and not exonerated)? Was the second jury not told??
They did that in Law and Order by running the trials at exactly the same time, and getting a conviction on both. I wondered if the real-life case was the same, or else it seems like the existence of a previous (and non-exonerated!) conviction for the same crime would be a big factor in the second trial, like you say…
That is, in *any *case, the police might be lying, the prosecutor twisting the evidence to support his case, the investigators make mistakes. I don’t know that it’s more likely because they convicted the wrong man before on the same charges. If anything, I’d think they’d be exceedingly careful when bringing the same charges up on a new defendant. Nothing looks worse in the newspapers than a *second *conviction and exoneration.