They are what Shklar labels “injustices.” The concept of normal or organizational accidents or misfortunes, of course, only covers part of the death penalty’s miscarriages of justice story.įalse convictions may not be accidental or unfortunate at all some are the result of conscious choices by culpable actors who knowingly present false testimony, withhold exculpatory evidence, or otherwise undermine the quest for truth in capital cases. The political theorist Judith Shklar might label such accidents “misfortunes.” They are events for which no human actor will be held responsible. In 2010, James Doyle, a Boston-based criminal defense lawyer, argued that false convictions in death cases are “‘organizational accidents’: …complex events in which small mistakes combined with each other and with latent conditions hidden in the system to produce unexpected tragedies.” They are so much a part of the system that they should be regarded as what the sociologist Charles Perrow has dubbed “normal accidents.” A normal accident occurs, Perrow writes, “because systems complexity makes failures inevitable.”Īnd typical precautions, by adding complexity, actually may lead to even more accidents. Shoddy defense lawyering, junk science, and myopic police work are all regular features of America’s death penalty system.
Sandman notes that “Among the flaws in the prosecution’s case was a medically implausible timeline and heavy reliance on circumstantial evidence.” The Washington Post quotes Cary Sandman, a federal public defender who has represented Jones in his quest for exoneration, as saying that “the evidence that supported the convictions against Jones ‘flawed’… the death sentence was the result of ‘shoddy and constitutionally deficient defense lawyering, junk science and myopic police work.’”
Jones is the 12th Arizona prisoner to be exonerated from death row in the last fifty years and the 192nd nationwide in that time period. He had been found guilty in 1994 of sexually assaulting and killing his girlfriend’s four-year-old daughter. Last Thursday, Barry Lee Jones was released from Arizona’s death row after his murder conviction and death sentence were set aside.
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