True Conviction

The title of this week's episode of Independent Lens (PBS) is a little misleading in that most who have escaped prosecution for decades are untouchable, therefore not subject to "true conviction."

I think the title best describes the passion of a group of exonerated prisoners to follow their convictions about innocence as far as it takes them, succeeding in several poignant cases to get prisoners released and their names cleared.  One wrongly-convicted man served  36 years for a motel robbery of $150, then died of cancer in prison just as he was about to be paroled due to hard work of these men.

In one case, a Houston man was convicted of murdering four people in a bowling alley--based entirely on his own forced conviction in a 26-hour interrogation.  Wrongly-convicted people--according to one lawyer--are often forced to extreme interrogations that leave the accused exhausted and willing to admit to a crimes they didn't actually commit.

A prosecutor in that case sticks to his story decades later because of his "true convictions," never mind new evidence to the contrary.  He got his word directly from God, he says, in a Bible verse in his daily Upper Room magazine.

But these men fighting to clear an innocent man--not educated but very smart--rejected that.  One said, in effect, "You believed he was guilty and you used that scripture to support what you already believed."