Preventing wrongful convictions during a few minutes at home

Sometimes it makes sense to take a break from documenting the horrors of wrongful convictions to discuss prevention. Readers of this blog already know the case I have made for the role of journalists in preventing wrongful convictions. Today, I want to emphasize the role any reader can play, simply by reading and encouraging everybody you know to read.

Here’s the plan: Newspapers, magazines and broadcast news outlets must enjoy financial health before editors will assign labor-intensive, frequently high-cost investigations of alleged wrongful convictions. Proving that an inmate is actually innocent after a jury or judge has convicted him is ridiculously time consuming.  In many of the thousands of local court jurisdictions, in the hundreds of federal court jurisdictions, journalists are the only folks willing and able to examine allegations of wrongful convictions.  Police, prosecutors and judges frequently refuse to delve into the possibility that the criminal justice system they think of as theirs could have malfunctioned so egregiously. Most citizens outside the criminal justice system lack the knowledge and/or the time and/or the budget to pursue such investigations.

Those same citizens, however, can support newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets by subscribing or viewing, by giving gift subscriptions to friends/relatives, by making donations (in the case of public broadcasting) that might even qualify as tax deductible.

It’s misguided to say I don’t need the mainstream media in my life because I can find everything I need to know online, often for free. Over and over, the mainstream media–maybe even news outlets you disrespect for whatever reasons–have investigated wrongful convictions and other miscarriages of justice when nobody else will. If you make a small contribution to maintaining the financial health of news organizations that train their staffs well, that are never cavalier about accuracy and thoroughness and fairness, you will improve your own life as well as lives of others.

End of today’s secular sermon.