They don't charge obviously innocent people. In the wrongful conviction context, you're usually talking about someone who had prior criminal history, was associated with bad people, and was in the area of the crime scene at the wrong time. Obviously they deserve justice, but it's not like police are charging random law-abiding citizens.
How obviously innocent would you like? How about playing in a youth league basketball game at the time of a murder, with the game on video provided by the team coach, and still ending up on death row at the age of 16. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareef_Cousin
edit - there is also Krishna Maharaj, who it seems was completely fitted up by the Florida police and who still has a life sentence despite 6 separate witnesses putting him 30 miles away from the murder he was originally sentenced to death for. http://www.reprieve.org.uk/cases/krishnamaharaj/
Or there is Dan Taylor, who's seemingly watertight alibi is that he was already in jail when the murder he was convicted for happened. Still didn't help him any despite police records confirming this - http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/chi-0112190353de...
Krishna Maharaj was definitely in the hotel room where the murder occurred before it happened and had business dealings with the victim that had gone poorly.
Dan Taylor gave a detailed confession.
I'm not saying they're guilty, but it's not like the cops just picked them up at random.
Dan Taylor didn't confess and then get picked up. Dan Taylor got picked up and then confessed to something it was clearly impossible for him to have done. Even if they proceed to convict you, the police do not think you are guilty if they have you in the cells at the time the crime occurred.
As for Krishna Maharaj, whether he knew the victim of the murder is fairly incidental to having 'admissions by former Miami police and those closely associated with law enforcement that they framed Maharaj and had a deal to help cover up Colombian cartel murders'.
The guy in that story was in possession of both the murder weapon and a ring taken from the victim. He was exonerated because the prosecutor failed to disclose evidence of a blood stain on the victims clothing that wasn't a match for his. That failure can't be condoned. But it's also ridiculous to act like the police just grabbed some guy off the street that was obviously innocent.
That's what I said about understanding what the injustices really are. The challenge isn't as simple as what you're saying: "just don't charge innocent people." The challenge is getting prosecutors to give defendants their due process, even when the defendants have damning evidence against them, when they have criminal records, when they are caught up in shady circumstances.
I read an article the other day about a guy who was convicted of murdering a pizza delivery driver in front of his wife and kids. There were questions about whether he had been the one to shoot, but there is no doubt that he and his friends were in the process of robbing the driver when one of their party shot the driver.
As I understand things, if an innocent (?) party dies while you're committing a felony, you're officially guilty of murder. I assume armed robbery of a pizza delivery guy is a felony (?), so why would the question of who pulled the trigger come up?
I don't actually like the you're-guilty-of-murder-if-your-cocriminal-kills-someone rule, but that seems like exactly the sort of case it's intended to work with.
There is, of course, the whole bell curve of erroneous outcomes. But you can't know a priori who are the genuinely innocent people. The reason justice reform is so hard is because it's hard to get police and prosecutors to assiduously assure people's due process rights when the overwhelming percentage of people they deal with are bad people.
I think prosecutorial misconduct is absolutely unacceptable. But I can also see why it happens, without assuming that it could only happen if large numbers of prosecutors were evil people who would convict someone they knew was innocent just to inflate their quota.
Yeah, I'm not shaking my pitchfork, I guess I'm thinking there is an interesting discussion to be had about how you make a system that is probably pretty good 10 or 100 or 1000 times better.
Or just target someone who you don't think will be able to adequately defend themselves, either in court or the press. Disproportionately, this means, poor people, minorities, immigrants, etc.
