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Police brutality and unfair adjudication are intrinsic stubborn diseases
of the United States. In March 2001, the family of a French victim brought
a lawsuit against the police and prison guards of the state of Nevada.
Nine prison guards were accused of beating the victim, Phillippe Leman,
to death. Forensic examinations identified the cause of death as suffocation
due to fracture of the throat bone. Yet, a local court pardoned the nine
prison guards and acquitted them of responsibilities for the death of
the French man.
Torture and forced confession are common in the United States, with the
number of convicts on the death row that are misjudged or wronged remaining
high. In December 2001, a man on the death row, Alon Patterson, claimed
that his confession was forced due to torture by Chicago police, who used
a plastic typewriter cover to suffocate him. The case aroused extensive
attention. As Chicago is under the jurisdiction of Cook County, Chicago
Herald Tribune sent reporters to investigate the archives of several thousand
murder cases in Cook since 1991. They found that verdicts were determined
in at least 247 cases without witness or evidence and that judgment was
based on confessions of the accused only. The credibility of such "confessions"
is subject to doubt.
US federal laws and 38 states allow the death penalty. Since the 1990s,
crimes punishable by death and the annual number of executions in the
United States have been on the increase. Annual executions increased from
23 in 1990 to 98 in 1999. In the last 20 years, the United States has
extended the death penalty to more than 60 crimes and speeded up executions
by restricting the right of the convicted to appeal. Since 1976 when the
US Supreme Court restored the death penalty, about 600 persons have been
executed in the United States. According to a February 11, 2002 Reuters
report, from 1973 to 1995, the verdicts of 68 percent of convicts on the
death row were overturned owing to misjudgment by the court. In the cases
with overturned verdicts, 82 percent of the convicts were sentenced to
lesser penalties and 9 percent were set free. Since 1973, a total of 99
convicts on the death row have been proven innocent. These people spent
an average of eight years of terror in death confines, sustaining tremendous
mental trauma. According to an analysis, main reasons for misjudgment
were failure to get legal counsel on the part of the accused, confession
forcing by the police and prosecutors, and misdirection of the jury by
judges.
The United States has the biggest prison population in the world. Prisons
there are overcrowded, and inmates ill-treated. A study by the Judicial
Policy Institute under the Juvenile and Criminal Hearing Center shows
that during the 1992-2000 period, 673,000 people were sent to state or
federal prisons and detention centers, and 476 out of every 100,000 people
were detained. With prisons burdened with too many inmates, violent conflicts
keep occurring. In December 2001, about 300 inmates in a California prison
staged a riot, which was put down by prison guards, using tear gas and
wooden bullets. Seven prisoners were seriously wounded. The prison in
question incarcerated more than 4,000 inmates though it was designed to
keep no more than 2,200. Overcrowding often leads to violent clashes among
prisoners. In 2000 alone, more than 120 prisoners staged riots, in which
ten people were wounded. Drug taking is prevalent in US prisons. In the
last ten years, at least 188 inmates died of drug abuse.
Punishment for sex offenders in the United States has become more and
more severe. Many phased-out cruel punishments have been reinstated. Some
criminals would select the extreme penalty of castration in exchange for
a penalty reduction. Castration had been removed as a penalty scores of
years before. According to the Los Angeles Times, in California in the
last three years, two sex offenders received castration in return for
release.
In February 2002, the world was shocked to learn of a scandal involving
a crematorium in the United States. Tri-State Crematory in the state of
Georgia, instead of cremating human bodies after receiving money for the
service, threw the corpses in the woods or stacked them in wooden sheds
like cordwood, leaving them to rot there. The shocking practice is said
to have lasted 15 years. More than 300 bodies have been found on the grounds
of the crematorium so far. The crime is shocking enough, but the state
of Georgia does not have a law that is applicable for the crime. What
verdict to pass on the suspect remains a legal difficulty.
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