Some have wondered why questions of discriminatory policing have not played a bigger role in election coverage. The second presidential debate took place some 15 miles from Ferguson, Missouri, without the name coming up.
There was an opening recently when Republican candidate Donald Trump stated toCNN (10/7/16) that five teenagers exonerated for the 1989 rape and assault of a woman jogging in Central Park were actually guilty. “They admitted they were guilty,” Trump said. “The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty.”
That was a great chance to talk about coerced confessions; the so-called Central Park Five were lied to, threatened, and interrogated without lawyers or their parents. Or about wrongful conviction: They all served years behind bars before DNA evidence and a confession tied another man to the crime.
But only a few—like Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post (10/7/16), Steven Holmes at CNN (10/7/16)—reminded us of Trump’s full-page screed in the New York Times, calling uncryptically for the young men to be executed and demanding an end to “our continuous pandering to the criminal population.” Trump’s CNN statement indicates that he would still support executing people whom the courts have found innocent. But no one withdrew their support or demanded an apology, and the comments were pushed off the page just hours later by the unearthing of tape of Trump joking about sexual assault.
Those abhorrent remarks deserve the attention; but as The Intercept‘s Liliana Segura (10/11/16) noted, Trump’s comments on the Central Park Five also have wider repercussion. The ugly truth, she writes, is that his attitude is all too common in district attorneys’ offices. Prosecutors routinely defend the convictions of innocent people even after exoneration, and often block efforts to test for such evidence as DNA in the first place. When convictions are overturned, DAs often refuse to drop charges, dragging out the legal fight and forcing people found innocent to live under constant threat of re-imprisonment.
Governors play a role—like Mike Pence, who recently refused to grant pardon to a man in Indiana, exonerated with DNA evidence after 10 years in prison. (Pence’s office said he refused to consider granting a pardon “out of respect for the judicial process.”)
Hillary Clinton has shown more concern about wrongful convictions, but, Segura notes, she still supports the death penalty. And while in theory one might support executions while opposing killing innocent people, reality—preeminently, the exoneration of more than 150 death row prisoners to date — shows these positions are irreconcilable.
Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the producer and host ofCounterSpin.
