He Was Innocent. He Served Eight Years Anyway

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Stephen Schulz is just one of many convicted by a legal system more committed to conviction rates and clearing dockets than to a search for truth.

thedailybeast.com
He Was Innocent. He Served Eight Years Anyway
Stephen Schulz is just one of many convicted by a legal system more committed to conviction rates and clearing dockets than by a search for truth.
11:55 AM · Oct 2, 2022

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It didn’t matter that he was innocent. That the waitress whose restaurant he allegedly robbed identified him from a photo lineup, then recanted her testimony on the witness stand. That the prosecution offered to drop the weapons possession charge against the restaurant’s cook if he fingered him as the robber. That the judge would not allow his defense attorney to show the jury a picture of a lookalike who had recently pled guilty to a half a dozen similar robberies around the time of the one he was on trial for.

All that mattered, it seemed, was that Stephen Schulz had a criminal record, and had refused a plea deal, instead opting to prove his innocence at trial. So for the crime of standing up for himself, Schulz was sentenced to 11 years in prison.

“We talk a lot about the presumption of innocence in this country,” says Daniel S. Medwed, author of Barred: Why the Innocent Can’t Get Out of Prison, “but once you become a suspect, there is a presumption of guilt that attaches, and it’s very difficult to budge.”

Schulz’s is only one of the many cases Medwed, a professor at Northeastern University School of Law, discusses in his book, which is a deep dive into the injustices of our judicial system, particularly the legal barriers it places in the way of those trying to prove their innocence.

From trial to conviction and appeal, it’s all a hot mess of legalese and procedural issues: how prosecutors clear their heavy caseloads by offering plea deals that involve a lesser sentence than if the defendant is convicted in court, causing both the innocent and guilty to accept a deal rather than the crap shoot of a trial (95 percent of criminal cases are now plea bargained); how habeas corpus petitions (literally asking the system to justify why they ‘have the body’ in custody) are regularly denied on appeal (less than .3 percent are approved on the federal level) because SCOTUS has ruled that an innocence claim can be reviewed only if it is also paired with a constitutional issue; and how parole and clemency decisions are basically based on a prisoner’s remorse, or sympathetic features in their cases—such as women who kill their abusers—but not on innocence.


*snip*