The saddest part is even this innocent person finally overturn the conviction, he still lost the whole world. With 5, 10, 15, or even 20 years in prison, how is this person going to adapt himself to the constant changing world. Socially, psychologically.....
I love ABC's new show inJustice. The show centers on a group of lawyers and investigators working cases in which an innocent person has been wrongly convicted, and goes behind the scenes of the case. The show is so new that it does not have its own website, but I believe it will be a hot show.
Watch it, I bet you won't be disappointed.
EXCERPTS from the New York Time about Shih Wei Su's case
A man whose attempted murder conviction was overturned after he served
a dozen years in prison is planning on filing a lawsuit charging that
Queens prosecutors have withheld evidence and misled juries in a broad
pattern of misconduct that has led to dozens of wrongful convictions.
The suit, which a lawyer expects to file today in federal court in
Brooklyn, details 84 instances in which criminal convictions obtained
by Queens prosecutors were reversed by higher courts for prosecutorial
wrongdoing. The lawsuit says that the Queens district attorney, Richard
A. Brown, and his predecessor, John J. Santucci, have not punished
prosecutors for their misbehavior.
The suit accuses prosecutors in some cases of presenting false
testimony by witnesses about their deals for leniency in exchange for
cooperation, according to a copy provided by the lawyer filing the
suit. It says prosecutors withheld evidence that could be seen as
motivating witnesses to give false testimony, and also accuses
prosecutors of making false or misleading trial presentations to
juries.
"These cases are just the tip of the iceberg," said Joel B. Rudin, a
Manhattan lawyer filing the suit on behalf of the Queens man. Mr. Rudin
won a $5 million settlement in a lawsuit against the Bronx district
attorney's office in 2003 involving prosecutorial misconduct. He said
that most convictions and plea deals involving prosecutorial misconduct
are never uncovered.
The plaintiff, Shih-Wei Su, was released from prison in 2003 after a
federal appeals court ruled that a Queens prosecutor elicited false
testimony against him and misled the jury during his 1992 trial. Mr. Su
was 18 when he was convicted in connection with a 1991 shooting in a
pool hall in Bayside. He was sentenced to 16 to 50 years in prison.
Mr. Su studied law while serving time at the Coxsackie Correctional
Facility in upstate New York, but lost the appeal of his conviction and
two further appeals before a Legal Aid lawyer, Katheryne M. Martone,
was appointed to his case. She gained access to a previously sealed
transcript documenting the deal that prosecutors made with a witness.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned
the conviction, saying the prosecution's conduct in Mr. Su's trial
violated the fundamental tenets of judicial integrity. "A conviction
that is obtained through testimony the prosecutor knows to be false is
repugnant to the Constitution," the appeals court said.
...
But prosecutors never told the jury about the deal, the appeals court
found. The court found that the lead prosecutor, Linda Rosero, had told
the jury that "there was technically no agreement" concerning the
conditions of the witness's testimony. Ms. Rosero asked the witness in
the trial whether he had been promised anything concerning the case
against him, and he responded, "Nothing at all."
...
Mr. Su said in a phone interview last night that the lawsuit was the
culmination of spending nearly half his life proving his innocence and
exposing corruption in the legal system. "I was robbed of the best 12
years of my life because of the legal system," said Mr. Su, who works
as a financial consultant in Manhattan.
"I lived like an animal with no rights," he said. "I was emotionally
dead in a never-ending nightmare, and the only thing keeping me alive
was that I wanted the world to know they are putting innocent people in
jail."
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