01/25/16 – David Krajicek – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
All right.
So, very interesting article here, America's Guilt Mill.
It's by David Krychek, and he writes for Alternet, New York Daily News, Justice Story, The Crime Report, and more.
And you can follow him on Twitter.
Well, just look at my Twitter feed today, and you'll see his handle there.
Welcome back to the show.
Or, not back to it.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you?
Thanks, Scott.
I'm doing well.
Very happy to have you here.
Sorry, I'm used to saying that a lot.
Thanks for asking.
Yeah.
Hey, listen.
Great article here.
Very illuminating.
If only, not to take anything away from you, but if only, because nobody ever writes about this or cares, which is actually kind of, I think, part of your point here, that this is a very overlooked part of injustice in the American criminal justice system.
So, if it's okay with you, and I'm sorry, because maybe this is annoying, but for me, the standard of what I, in some ways, still kind of conceive American justice as being or as supposed to working, and I think that most Americans would probably at least sympathize with me, if not completely agree with me, is from watching Matlock, and watching Perry Mason, and then I guess nowadays it's all Law and Order, this and that, which I got sick of that a long time ago, but people watch a lot of that.
But the bottom line in every episode of Matlock is that as soon as the prosecutor realizes that, hey, I have some reasonable doubt here, he moves to dismiss the charges with prejudice, Your Honor.
I'm so sorry.
Boy, I lost to Perry Mason again, or Matlock again, but better that than put an innocent man in prison.
And you know what I think?
I think everybody thinks that that's how it works, but I think from reading your article that maybe it's not.
Yeah, I'm sorry to break that news to you, man.
It's not like on TV.
Yeah, there's never injustice on TV.
I think a fundamental problem with our system, with our prosecutorial system today is that the goal is not justice.
The goal is conviction.
And when you start at that point, you know, mistakes are going to happen.
Right.
Well, I've said it before, and I'll say it a million times just because I love it, and I think it speaks right to what you're saying.
Back when I was a cab driver years ago, I had an ADA from Harris County, that's Houston, in my cab, and I was taking her to an ADA convention or something.
And so I was kind of picking a fight with her politely, right, and arguing about stuff and what have you.
And she came out with the fact that, according to her, which is quite believable, at the Harris County District Attorney's office, they have a slogan.
If they really didn't do it, they'll get out on appeal.
And what it meant was that anyone the cops bring them, they will nail them to the wall.
They'll give them life without parole if they can.
And they don't even think of whether they're guilty or not.
They don't even care to know whether this guy really deserves what they're doing or not.
All they need to know is that that's what the cops said.
End of argument.
Nail them to the wall.
And then, hey, screw them.
It'll work out fine if they really aren't the one.
And I think that's a good point.
And I think you're seeing today the chickens coming home to roost, in a sense, in some of these police shooting cases, police-involved shootings, that have made the headlines for the past year and a half or so, is the idea of testifying by cops, where they basically cob together a story and they stick to it.
Every cop involved from the lowest level right up through supervisors, and then they carry that story to the DA, and then they can't be shaken from it.
You started out with saying this is a story that's not covered.
Exonerations are covered.
The National Registry of Exonerations at the University of Michigan does a great job of counting exoneration.
And so far, there have been about 1,700 that confirmed exoneration since 1989.
But the point of my article, and it's one of the great mysteries in American law enforcement, is where are all the missing exonerations?
Because those 1,700 exonerations, more than seven out of ten of them are for either homicide or a sexual assault.
Your listeners are smart enough to know that that's not the prevalent form of crime in America.
The most prevalent form of crime in America, of course, are low-level crimes, thefts, burglaries, robberies, aggravated assaults.
I just threw a couple of numbers at you.
Roughly 100,000 cases each year in the U.S. are either a homicide or a violent sexual assault.
100,000 a year.
Compare that to the fact that every year there are about 350,000 robberies alone in this country.
There are about 700,000 aggravated assaults in this country and about 2 million burglaries a year in this country.
And yet, the combination of all exonerations for those so-called lesser crimes amount to a handful.
It's something like 15% of the total exoneration.
So criminologists have been puzzling for years about where are the missing exonerations?
Why are these cases not coming to the fore?
The smartest people in that business believe that roughly 5%, let's say 3% to 5% of all convictions of all types from traffic court to life without parole or even death penalty homicide cases, 3% to 5% every single year are bad, are wrongful for one reason or another.
And it's a great mystery of where in the world are all these missing exonerations.
That means that every year there are about a million people who are convicted of serious crimes in America.
Every year, as many as 50,000 of them are wrongful.
So the point of my piece, which by the way was supported by a great Washington organization called the Fund for Investigative Journalism, they gave me a little money so I could dedicate some time to looking into this great puzzle, my point was to try to figure out why we don't know about more of them.
And you saw the result, for better or for worse.
Well, and it seems like, I guess, I mean, my hypothesis just off the start, and I guess you kind of addressed this right at the beginning, is when people are quite possibly innocent and they're facing the death penalty or life in prison, that becomes a lot higher priority for the few lawyers who are focused on this to make sure to focus on them.
Because after all, limited resources, if somebody is wrongfully doing 10 years, that sucks, but that's not as important as getting someone out who's facing life for something that he didn't do or something like that.
So that's really the major cause of it right there is just a lack of lawyers who have the wherewithal to spend their time doing this, right?
That's definitely part of it.
I'll give you two or three bullet points to flesh that out a little bit.
I'm right now dealing with a case of an individual serving life without parole for homicide in Bessemer Prison in Alabama.
I'm talking to you from Montgomery, Alabama.
He's up in Bessemer.
This guy has written letters to 100 wrongful conviction advocates, and they ignore him.
And this is a life without parole, or this is a guy who potentially is going to spend 60 or 70 years locked up.
He can't even get the attention of the Innocence Project, any chapter of the Innocence Project.
And as a lawyer told me in my piece, the Innocence Project is not even going to take a look at any of these lesser crimes.
So why is that?
Well, first of all, there's no DNA testing in most of these lesser cases.
Still, it continues to be the case that two-thirds of the exonerations that we do find out about are the result from DNA evidence.
Secondly, a lot of these cases- It's interesting, isn't it, that the most violent, I guess it's not that much of a coincidence or whatever, but in murders and rapes, it's much more likely that DNA evidence is going to be left around, and plus, those are the ones that get the headlines and drive the police money and all that.
There often would be DNA evidence, even in burglaries and deaths.
Somebody breaks into your car and they cut their hand on the broken window, but generally the police departments are not going to test that DNA.
They're not going to test it.
Just on the more high-profile ones.
I'm sorry, we've got to pause and take this break here, David, but we'll be right back, everybody, with David Krychek.
He wrote this very interesting piece at the Crime Report.
Yeah, it's a year old, but still, it's really good.
America's Guilt Mill, and it's about all the innocent rotting in state and federal prisons right now.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
We're talking with David Krychek.
He writes for Alternet, New York Daily News, Justice Story, and The Crime Report.
This one is at The Crime Report, America's guilt mill, and we're talking about some of the reasons why it's so easy for innocent people to go to prison.
I believe you said, sir, you estimate, or someone else estimated that you thought was credible, approximately 15,000 people a year convicted of crimes that they didn't commit, and- Five.
Five, zero, 15,000.
I'm sorry, 50,000?
50,000, yeah.
Five percent of a million.
Oh, pardon me.
Yeah, yeah.
You know?
Dang cell phones, you know?
No, I'm just kidding.
Okay, so listen.
Yeah, 50,000 innocent people.
Yeah, and that's no surprise.
I mean, it's shocking, but it shouldn't be surprising.
But, you know, so here's one of the things I wanted to ask you about.
I'm sorry to take you off your list.
I'll let you back on your train of thought if you want, but I'm worried about, and I wonder about, the judges.
It seems like it's very easy to explain why the prosecutors, the prosecutors, the judges, the prosecutors, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the 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judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, the judges, So it sounds like what you're saying though is we need a complete overhaul here.
Is it we got to legalize drugs and driving infractions to just get the clutter out of the way so they can do the real business of criminal justice.
Because after all we're talking about especially when violent felonies we're talking about decades in prison or worse.
We're talking about people's one chance in a human life that they got sitting in the cage.
Yeah, and even in these lesser cases, and that's one of the issues here, you know, the Innocence Project says that it takes an average of five to seven years for one of its cases to wind its way through the process, five to seven years from when they get a letter from somebody saying, hey, I was wrong, to when that individual is exonerated.
Most of these cases that I'm writing about, burglary, theft, you know, break-ins, your basic robberies, these people are serving, you know, two years, three years, and that's another reason the Innocence Project doesn't look at it, because they're done, they're gone before the lawful conviction would have winded its way along.
Well, now, I mean, you talk about the level of traffic fines and this and that, but I guess, isn't that all handled by municipal courts and county judges and whatever on a different level than the felony counts?
Shouldn't those judges be able to take more time?
Why are the traffic fines even relevant when it comes to clogging up the other parts of the courts?
I'll be honest, I've spent time in courthouses in a lot of different jurisdictions from Midwest to the Northeast to the South, and they all kind of function the same way, whether it's traffic court or whether it's, you know, a felony district court.
There's a time imperative with every case that comes in front of that judge, and the judge is always impatient, you know, let's get to the point, let's get this over with.
That's a prevailing attitude, and it's kind of a prevailing attitude, unfortunately, for public defenders, too, who, you know, as it's well-documented, are underpaid and overworked.
So yeah, going back to what you said a few minutes ago, you know, some sort of a top-to-bottom rethinking where the goal is not just to get a case done, the goal is to somehow find justice in getting that case done.
Well, now, what if we just completely legalized drugs, and I mean let Walgreens sell heroin, the trade in it, the possession of it, and all of that, just forget the entire prohibition?
What percentage of the chaff would that weed out?
Yeah, that would speed things up a lot.
It would probably...
Take a lot of the violence with it, too, of course.
Yeah, yeah, but just in terms of the arrests and so forth, you know, you see a lot of cities like New York going away from arrests for minor marijuana possession in favor of, you know, written tickets violations.
It would probably, if that were the case, if that were the standard across the country, it probably would cut 15% of cases out of misdemeanor court and, you know, a comparable number probably in someone's felony court.
You know, back when I still thought that the state should exist at all, I thought, well, maybe if its only job was national defense and criminal justice, then the democracy could focus like a laser just on these issues and make sure we get this right, make sure that people really do get a chance to confront their accusers or else it ain't fair.
And I don't even believe that anymore, but, you know, I don't know who could do anything about it.
When we see major efforts by leading politicians along these lines, we're talking about minor little corrections, if anything, right?
Like you said, maybe legalized pot possession somewhat or something.
I mean, at that rate, it's going to take us till a couple of centuries from now to fix this thing.
Yeah.
And moreover, you know, what's going on right now in American court systems is budget cuts.
So everybody's forced to do less with it, do more with less, and that exacerbates the problem also.
You know, everybody's under pressure from the clerks to the judges to the, you know, you name it, top to bottom.
Yeah.
Okay.
Could you talk a little bit about false confessions as you do in the article here?
Why would a man admit to something that he didn't do that he knows these guys are going to put him in the clink for?
Yeah.
Well, first of all, it's often a case of choosing the lesser of two evils.
Well, but I'm not talking about just a guilty plea.
I'm talking about signing a thing that says, yeah, I committed this actual crime.
Yeah.
That's a really interesting psychological phenomenon.
And, you know, often it's a case of, you know, the term Midwest nice, you know, people in Nebraska and Minnesota and the Dakotas, you know, they're just nice people.
They just want to be helpful.
Sure.
We have that in Texas too.
Yeah.
Well, there's, you know, there's a, Texas is good at it, but it's kind of a fake nice in Texas, isn't it, Scott?
Well, it depends.
Anyway, you know, people are sitting there, you know, a guy sitting here with these two detectives and, you know, they're pretty nice guys and, you know, you want to be helpful and, you know, so, so part of it is the art of schmoozing.
You know, you're getting schmoozed by these detectives and you don't really know it.
You know, you're asked a series of leading questions and you go, well, yeah, kind of.
I worked on, at the very beginning, at the onset, I worked on the Central Park jogger case for the New York Daily News way back when, and, you know, that was a classic example.
And one thing they'll do, Scott, is they'll say, hey, your buddy confessed.
You know, that guy in the other room there, your best friend, he confessed.
And not only did he confess, he's laying some of it on you, man.
So you say, well, screw that.
I'm going to fix him.
Yeah, I was there.
I didn't see it happen.
I didn't participate.
It was, you know, it was my friend Juan.
And, you know, then they take that to the next room and say, hey, you know, Juan and Dave have confessed, man, and they're laying it on you.
Oh, well, you know, so that's part of the process, too.
It's psychological warfare that goes on in police interview rooms.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm sorry to bring this up.
I just watched last night's Out in the Pirate Bay, this new movie, Regression, about the satanic panic of the early 90s.
And the thing starts with a guy saying, well, jeez, if my daughter says it, I must have done it because she wouldn't lie.
And that's, dang, man, wait, call your lawyer.
Slow down.
Anyway, Witch Hunt on from that point on.
Anyway, listen, hey, great work.
I really appreciate you coming on the show and caring about this enough to help illuminate it, David.
Really appreciate it.
Thank you.
I appreciate the time.
We'll do it again sometime.
OK, good deal.
That's David Krychek, everybody.
And we'll see y'all tomorrow.
Oh, look him up.
Crime Report.
Uh, Org.
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