Why MRAs Are Celebrating the Brian Banks Case for the Wrong Reason

Submitted by Mastodon on Fri, 2013-04-12 19:40

Article here. Excerpt:

'At age 17, high school football player Brian Banks was wrongfully convicted of rape. He spent five years in prison but was exonerated in May 2012. Last week, Banks signed with the Atlanta Falcons, and the country rejoiced.

Not surprisingly, some men’s rights activists are hailing this as a victory for their cause. They shouldn’t be. They’re right that Banks’s exoneration, and his new career, are good news, but the Banks case is not an example of a victory for men everywhere (when, when will there finally be a victory for men?!). Rather, it’s a rare instance of our justice system eventually doing right by the wrongfully convicted.

Cases like Banks’s, in which a person is wrongfully convicted and later exonerated, are the exception, not the rule. While it’s next to impossible to calculate the exact number of innocent people in prison, we know this: there are a lot. Some people are never exonerated. Those that are exonerated are left to fend for themselves after years in prison, and without any resources or support system. If men’s rights activists are as incensed as they claim to be about our broken justice system, where is their anger at cases like the West Memphis Three, which left three innocent men in prison for decades? A search for “Brian Banks” on Reddit’s “men’s rights” subforum turns up a seemingly never-ending list of results. A search for “West Memphis” yields one result.'

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"While it’s next to impossible to calculate the exact number of innocent people in prison, we know this: there are a lot."

Here's this from The Innocence Project

http://tinyurl.com/d27m36q
"Q. How many innocent people are there in prison?

A. We will never know for sure, but the few studies that have been done estimate that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent (for context, if just 1% of all prisoners are innocent, that would mean that more than 20,000 innocent people are in prison).

More broadly, we know that innocent people are often identified as suspects by law enforcement and that DNA testing often clears them before they go to trial, but that DNA testing is impossible in the vast majority of criminal cases. In approximately 25% of cases where DNA testing was done by the FBI during the course of investigations, suspects were excluded by the testing. That doesn’t mean we believe 25% of convictions are in error, but when coupled with the fact that DNA testing is only possible in 5-10% of all criminal cases, it shows that science cannot always clear innocent suspects, which can result in wrongful convictions."

The Innocence Project also notes that Four of the first 250 DNA exonerees were women.

The last time I checked, approximately, 93 percent of the prison population was male, but the number of women in prison has been increasing steadily so that number may have become outdated. http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/index.cfm

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Submitted by MR on Sat, 2013-04-13 17:56