Harris County is currently
wrestling with the issue of whether ‘not guilty’ actually means ‘innocent’.
Alfred Dewayne Brown recently applied for compensation for the 12 years he spent in TDJ. Although I
believe the ultimate decision rests with the state comptroller, Houston’s police
union continues to insist that he is guilty and therefore ineligible.
This article by the Houston Chronicle presents part of the story; that phone records which could
have been helpful to Brown’s defense were never presented to the defense, and
were in fact hidden away in a detective’s garage. What it does not mention,
however, was how Brown’s girlfriend and alibi at the time was bullied andthreatened by members of a grand jury into reversing her testimony; she flipped
from saying that Brown had spoken to her by phone from their apartment at the
time of the murders, to claiming that he had admitted to her that he was
guilty.
Devon
Anderson decided that there was no longer enough evidence to try him and dismissed
the charges. You would think that an overturned conviction and dismissal would
be enough to return him to his previous legal status; innocent until proven guilty.
But because no official has declared him ‘actually innocent’, he may be told to
piss off without a penny for the 12 years gone.
The
horror presented in these articles is that of a guilty man getting one over onthe system; that Brown may be guilty and therefore does not deserve to be paid
for his time. However, the most basic premise of our justice system is
Blackstone’s formulation, that “the
law holds it better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent
party suffer”. When we abandon that principle, when we relax the standard
of proof as happened in Carlos Coy’s case, we end up at a point where anyone
who comes before the court is more likely to suffer than not.
4 comments:
I wanna ask carlos if he is really in a relationship with carolyn rodriguez? & what happened to his wife? Or was i wrong to think he was married?
Ariel,
He said his divorce went through last month.
Why did they get divorced?
can I ask Carlos, who is the person behind his song that gets killed? as in "real gangsta" "land of the lost" "to the flame". are they about the same person? and if so what is the backstory? (btw, huge fan from the H) much love to you los
- Ant
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