Political Quotes

“any one of us can only imagine what it would be like to be wrongly arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for a crime we did not commit. And whatever we imagined would pale by comparison to reality. Kirk Nobel Bloodsworth, who I am privileged to call a friend, was the victim of such a horrific miscarriage of justice. He served 9 years for the rape and murder of a young girl he never met, based on the mistaken identification by one of Kirk's neighbors. Eyewitness identifications, assumed to be among the best evidence, are notoriously unreliable. Case after case demonstrates this. Take the massive search currently underway for Christopher Dorner, the former Los Angeles police officer suspected in three killings. The police have been inundated with numerous false ``sightings.'' Kirk Bloodsworth is a free man today not because the justice system worked. For 9 years it failed miserably, and during that time the real killer was free. Rather, he had to prove his innocence thanks to DNA evidence, which is not available in most cases. One shudders to think of the number of factually innocent people who may be serving long sentences for whom exoneration through DNA testing isn't an option. A February 5, 2013, article in the New York Times quotes Kirk: ``The adversarial system doesn't know who's guilty or who's innocent.…”