Well the Supremem Court has ruled that actual innocence isn’t the determining factor in capital cases.
A slight hijack here, but IIRC there are certain circumstances were you can escape from prison in a way that is not a crime (not counting following another’s escape route - never heard of that one). They are basicly if you are being abused in some way, you can leagaly escape but must promptly turn your self in to another juristiction.
Given that most death sentences are later found to be made in error, if you started actually looking at innocence, then you’d never get to off anybody.
For fun facts on the issue, refer to The Liebman Study
http://justice.policy.net/jpreport/index.html
Just to inject some facts in the thread, here’s the complete text of the New York State Penal Code on Escape:
All fairly clear cut. Now to address some of the arguments made here, court decisions have said the following:
All of the above demonstrate that a defendant’s guilt or innocence on his original conviction has no bearing on his guilt or innocence on an escape.
And on a side note, in what I can only assume is an indication of some annotator’s dry sense of humor, I found the following decision listed as an cite for sufficiency of evidence standards:
Can you give a citation for that? If true, then the law is truly “a ass.”
It’s no wonder that my children (and older grandchildren) don’t really respect the law.
They’re just afraid of it.
And I can’t honestly argue with them.
Peace,
mangeorge
Take a look at the case of Roger Coleman:
http://www.amnesty.it/ailib/aipub/1998/AMR/25106998.htm
The Virginia courts and the U.S. Supreme Court agreed that because his appeal attorneys missed a deadline, he had no right to bring a case to court showing that new evidence exonerated him.
Most??? I think you should not be so wreckless with such extravagant exaggeration! Or do you really think that more than 50% of people executed are actually innocent?
Well, not exactly. The new evidence did not exonerate him. The cite said that he was convicted purely on “circumstantial evidence.” What evidence isn’t circumstantial other than an eye witness or a confession? So the jailhouse informer recanted. Perhaps on a re-trial, a jury would not consider the evidence strong enough absent that testimony. Mere conjecture. His attorney missed the filing date by one day. Hey, a time limit is a time limit. Where do you draw the line? The law gives a certain amount of time to do things and time, therefore, is of the essence.
Perhaps he was innocent. But that’s a far cry from saying that the SC allowed the execution of an innocent man. They allowed the execution of a person found guilty. There was no proof that he was innocent.
barbitu8 writes:
> There was no proof that he was innocent.
You’re quite right. I wasn’t offering that case as an example where it was clear that an innocent man had been executed. I was offering it as an example where a defendant had been denied a chance to bring new evidence to a court (although he did have a chance to bring it to the governor) because his lawyers, out of their incompetence, had missed a deadline.
You really should have had a look at the document which I cited in my post before you accused me of being “so [w]reckless with such an extravagant exaggeration.”
The Liebman Study was made at the request of the Chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. The study found that “Over the course of the 23-year study period a large majority of death sentences subjected to judicial inspection nationally and in nearly all death-sentencing states were found to be seriously flawed and were reversed by the courts.”
So please go read the study. It unequivocally supports my statement that “most death sentences are later found to be made in error.” If you take serious issue with the methodology of the study, then come on back so that we can talk about it. But read it thoroughly before making any more hasty accusations against me.
As far as your asking if I believe that “more than 50% of people executed are actually innocent,” I have no position on this matter, and it does not logically follow from my statement. Remember that there is a tremendous difference between being sentenced to die, and eventually being executed. This difference is where the judicial error comes in.
Roger Coleman is an interesting example, for it was a Virginia matter.
I paraphrase from the Liebman Study: Virginia has the highest execution rate per capital conviction of any state (nearly double that of the next nearest state, and five times the national average) and a low rate of capital reversals (nearly half that of the next nearest state, and less than one-fourth the national average).
http://justice.policy.net/jpreport/index.html
So what do Liebman’s findings concerning Virginia mean? Are trial judges so darn good in Virginia that they make relatively very few errors when compared against other states, or is it that Virginia appellate judges are more tolerant of serious judicial error? Does the lack of state-provided counsel or funding at the appeal level make it less likely that appeals will be properly bought forward? I suggest that if an innocent person were to be up on capital charges, Virginia would be a bad place to be.
Once the defendant is found guilty, the burden of proof shifts to him. He is now assumed to be guilty until he can prove himself innocent. So if he can prove that a witness against him lied that wouldn’t be sufficient to prove him innocent, even though that witness’ testimony was part of the evidence that convicted him. He would have to do something like produce an alibi that proved he could not have been present where the crime occurred.
Most capitol punishment appeals are not based on producing evidence of proving the condemned person’s innocence. Generally they seek to introduce evidence which they feel might have, if it had been introduced in the original trial, have made it unlikely to have proven the defendant was guilty. And for the above stated reasons, lawyers realize that this type of evidence is not going to overturn a conviction. Generally these appeals are made for publicity purposes to attempt to raise a public demand for a commutation.
So often when courts refuse to hear appeals they do so because they realize that from a legal standpoint the appeal is moot. Even if the facts of the appeal are proven, the argument will have no bearing on the case.
My personal opinion is that it isn’t if you are escaping because you were wrongly imprisoned. :smack: Please feel free to disagree, however. 
First of all this is General Questions and we are not supposed to get into opinions. Second this is an over 10 year old zombie thread and you haven’t added anything new to the discussion which is a no-no.
Moderator Action
I think it’s best to put this poor zombie back into his grave.
Thread closed.