Phil Helsel reports for NBC:
KUSA has this video report on the overturning of the prior conviction.
The rules of law that set criminals free despite solid evidence of guilt tend to be taught in abstract, antiseptic terms in law school. Most law students go along with their pro-defendant professors and endorse these rules. I have known students and lawyers to react in horror at the very idea that anyone would challenge Miranda v. Arizona and Mapp v. Ohio. Many are completely incapable of grasping the distinction between these entirely court-created doctrines and the actual Bill of Rights.
Yet these rules have real, human costs. They have costs when victims and their families see perpetrators walk. They have even greater costs when those perpetrators commit new crimes.
A former death-row inmate has been charged with keeping a woman captive and sexually assaulting her for months in Colorado, officials said Thursday.
"She's been through hell and back," Mesa County Sheriff's Office Sgt. Henry Stoffel told NBC station KUSA.
Claude Lee Wilkerson, 61, was arrested in February and charged Monday with 10 counts in all, including first-degree kidnapping, false imprisonment, sexual assault and harboring a minor, according to court documents.But Wilkerson was once sentenced to death for a prior murder. He never should have hurt anyone again. How did he get off? His confession was thrown out, and his conviction was reversed, not because the confession was involuntary in violation of the real Fifth Amendment actually in the Constitution, but only because its taking did not comply with the Miranda rule invented by the Supreme Court out of whole cloth in 1966.
KUSA has this video report on the overturning of the prior conviction.
The rules of law that set criminals free despite solid evidence of guilt tend to be taught in abstract, antiseptic terms in law school. Most law students go along with their pro-defendant professors and endorse these rules. I have known students and lawyers to react in horror at the very idea that anyone would challenge Miranda v. Arizona and Mapp v. Ohio. Many are completely incapable of grasping the distinction between these entirely court-created doctrines and the actual Bill of Rights.
Yet these rules have real, human costs. They have costs when victims and their families see perpetrators walk. They have even greater costs when those perpetrators commit new crimes.
This is another example of why we should not allow Justice Scalia, whose brilliant Dickerson dissent left the "reasoning" of Miranda in shambles, to be replaced by the kind of Justice who is fine with re-inventing the Constitution as he or she sees fit.
It's also an example of the "protected" vs. the "unprotected." Sanctimonious (and well-paid) liberals, in academia and many other places, say Miranda is needed -- even if invented -- because the police are Nazis. Those liberals are largely protected from the violence their sanctimony visits on the people who don't count, like the grossly abused victim in this case.
Then these self-same liberals lecture the rest of us about how "humanitarian" they are.
Yikes.
There was a strong dissent in the original case that freed Dickerson. Case is here for anyone interested.
http://tx.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.19830518_0040894.TX.htm/qx
Briefly, cops spoke with def - without his lawyer - while in custody and represented by counsel. Def agreed to cooperate if allowed to speak to one victim's widow first. Before confessing , he ran into his lawyer in hallway and insisted in cooperating. Confession suppressed.
Original point of exclusion was to discourage future police misconduct, but it seems (to me) that most courts now treat suppression as something routine for any infraction, however minor, which has no philosophical point but is just another arbitrary rule, analogous to a speed limit, say
JC.