A fellow student passed this article along to me. It briefly outlines a horrific miscarriage of justice from 1944. A 14 year old boy was sentenced to death for allegedly killing two white girls; the young boy was black. Advocates for this case have pushed for its re-opening so as to exonerate the name of this young boy. The attorneys working on this case, according to the article, have discovered substantial evidence pointing to the innocence of this young man.

In light of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I really wonder if we, as a society, have come all that far from the days of MLK. Certainly the standards for sentencing individuals to death have improved (you can no longer sentence a mentally disabled person to death nor a child under the age of 18), but have we come much farther than that?

Articles such as this one really make me question, more than I usually do, what our criminal justice system stands for. If the system were truly interested in seeking justice the argument certainly could be made that cases such as this one would be reviewed without such hesitation and stagnation. Why wouldn’t South Carolina want to uncover the truth and give the young boy’s remaining family members some closure and vindication of his innocence? Are they so scared of facing their past wrongs that they are unwilling to do what is right? Even if the evidence continues to point to the boy’s guilt after all this time, what is the harm in re-examining the case?

The Innocence Project has time and again proved many convictions contain faults. Primarily, wrongful convictions rested on eyewitness testimony, unvalidated or improper forensics, false confessions or admissions, or informants or snitches.

It is no longer a secret that mistakes can be and are made. Why, then, do governments continually try to turn a blind eye to cases such as this one?