Witness ⚖️
"Nobody gets justice. People only get good luck or bad luck."
—Orson Welles
> newsworthy | justice for glynn
While learning how to live without alcohol and working at coffee shops in my hometown of Tulsa, I picked up a side hustle.
I began writing for the Web site of a local Tulsa attorney named Joe Norwood. He's helped free five people from different Oklahoma cases who were wrongfully convicted and spent decades in prison. 🏛️
The first post went smoothly, so I wrote another. And another.
- I wrote about the longest-serving wrongfully convicted man in America, Glynn Simmons.
A state judge in 2023 declared Simmons fully innocent of a 1974 Oklahoma City murder after Joe took the case. At the heart of the Simmons conviction was a deeply questionable eyewitness.
Then I wrote about Perry Lott and Corey Atchison and Malcolm Scott and Demarchoe Carpenter. At the heart of their cases also were troubling eyewitnesses and no physical evidence.
We have a powerful desire to perceive police and the criminal justice system as emblems of community safety and security. These desires are reinforced through media effects from police-reality shows, the news, movies, and true crime.
The result is a collective perception of police and criminal justice in which we believe criminal cases must be brimming with solid, physical evidence. They must be stuffed with witnesses who saw everything with near-perfect clarity and memory.
Not even close. As Oklahoma's wrongfully convicted can testify, Joe's clients were too easily sent to prison when no physical evidence existed at all. And it still happens today.
- next time "His body shook and he dripped with sweat at his own wedding."
- listening Public Enemy "Don't Believe the Hype"
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