If you are arrested for a crime in the United States and lack the resources to put on an O.J. Simpson style defense, you are going to jail unless you can absolutely prove your innocence. Don't believe me? Ask Tim Masters. He was a skinny 15 year old kid who weighed 120 pounds when a horrible murder happened near his home. The murder required someone to use extreme force and haul a 120 pound woman's body over 120 feet across a field in order to hide it. Yet, he went to jail for murder -- because he could not prove he was innocent.
Today Tim Masters is out of jail because volunteers for the Innocence Project found DNA evidence that the State had deliberately hidden, and testing of this DNA evidence proved that Tim Masters did not do the murder. But how many other Tim Masters are there in jail today courtesy of the power of the State being brought down upon the most likely suspect rather than there being any kind of justice? We'll never know...
And right now, I can hear right-wingnuts ramping up their objections to Tim Masters' release, saying that railroading a 15 year old boy into an adult conviction for murder was "justice". And so it goes in Soviet America, where everyone is guilty -- until you can prove you're innocent. And even afterwards, in some people's minds.
-- Badtux the Law Penguin
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