Amy J. Berg Quotes
I just think it's so outrageous that fifteen years is the kind of minimum amount of time that any wrongfully convicted person spends in prison.
Radish, Christina. "Director Amy Berg Talks WEST OF MEMPHIS, Her Reaction to the Facts of the Case, the Benefit of Peter Jackson's Involvement and Her Janis Joplin Biopic." Collider, 24 Dec. 2012.
Mistakes in the criminal justice system have been with us from the birth of the nation.
It is unfortunately too common that people have been convicted and jailed because of misconduct of the police or prosecutors. Most criminal justice agencies in recent years have examined their methods and procedures and reforms are in progress. But there is still a human problem. For an example see Quote
He was referring to exonerations for capital crimes like murder. He had written a book about a case where a man who was later proved innocent was reprieved only 5 days before his execution.
a dozen grand jury probes In 2000 Edwards was convicted.
Watkins was the first Dallas County Black DA. He was being interviewed because DNA testing proved that a man who had served 30 years in prison for rape and robbery, could not have committed the crime, and he had just been released. Watkins quotation was very significant because it set forth a philosophy that while extant in other areas of the country is almost unheard of in Texas, where there have been more innocent men convicted than in any other state. DAs in Texas usually fight every attempt to examine old evidence with modern tools.
Adopted by the original Edinburgh Review Magazine as its motto.
This interesting historical quotation illustrates the fact that in almost every American generation there are those who believe that society has gone too far in protecting the rights of criminal suspects at the expense of law and order in the general society. This is nothing new. This is a classic argument given by those who would deny a defendant the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination. The belief that an innocent man has nothing to fear from the police is refuted by the many cases of innocent men being convicted by evidence they have given in the belief that they were innocent, and served long jail sentences only to later be proved by DNA evidence that they could not possibly have been guilty. Since Nott’s day, society has not only found many cases where honest error was made by the police or prosecutors, but many where there was venal prosecutorial misconduct and defendants were jailed even though the authorities were aware of evidence of innocence and kept it secret. There have been a number of these cases where a defendant was on death row and about to be executed when it was found he was innocent. Probably there have been men wrongly executed. See {629444} for a probable example.
He was describing a real case in Canada. There as well as the United State, for those who oppose capital punishment give as their main reason the mistakes made by the criminal justice system, and the innocent people who have been executed.
The Senator was referring to the large number of people who had been exonerated by DNA evidence while on Death Row.
Amy J. Berg is an American filmmaker. Her 2006 documentary Deliver Us from Evil (2006), about sex abuse cases in the Roman Catholic Church, was nominated for an Academy Award and won Berg the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Documentary Screenplay.
