innocence offending

Do you treat the wrongly convicted innocent as if they are guilty?

below is the script for this video

Let me introduce you to a fresh concept: “innocence offending”.

Anyone who treats a wrongly convicted innocent person as “guilty” offends that person if complicitly denying them of their stolen rights. All under color of law. This exists as a legally privileged offense.

By innocent, I mean the convicted person had no role in the reported offense. But surely there aren’t that many innocent people in prison, are there?

Well, actually, there are. Between 4 and 6% of all prisoners are actually innocent. Not wrongly convicted because of some legal technicality. But they played no role in the crime whatsoever. Or there was no crime. Like when an infant dies from an undiagnosed brain hemorrhage, and the mother is found guilty of shaken baby syndrome.

That amounts to about a hundred thousand innocent people who are falsely incarcerated. Sure, some of these have sorted pasts, but many—like myself—have no other criminal record. With around nineteen million Americans with a felony record, that comes to about a million innocent lives treated as if they are felons when they’re actually not.

Many of these innocent defendants serve the full time in prison, being denied for parole because they could not show remorse, and then get released without their rights restored. They endure what are called “collateral consequences of criminal conviction”. Meaning that they may be excluded from certain types of jobs, or not allowed to be licensed for certain professions, and not allowed to own or posses a firearm.

There are thousands of such restrictions on the books, damaging the lives of the innocent beyond prison. All because the adversarial judicial system mistakenly marked them as felons.

The law privileges such violation of rights because misapplication of the law produced the wrongful conviction in the first place. The tables then turn. These innocent defendants become victims of the very legal system we count upon to protect us from victimizers.

The current legal system remains slow in identifying and admitting such errors. And even slower in correcting them. At the time of this writing, less than four thousand have been exonerated. The legal system moves like molasses.

What can the wrongly convicted innocent do if the legal system itself is the primary offender? What can you do about it? What if you find out that you could be an innocence offender?

That refers to anyone who violates the rights of the wrongly convicted innocent. If you passively defer to the imperfections and errors of the adversarial judicial system, you could be smeared as a complicit innocence offender.

What can you do to avoid becoming complicit in this hidden crisis? You can start by checking your beliefs. Elites who benefit from this imperfect adversarial system count on you accepting a number of myths that keep them in power.

You risk being complicit if you believe and act upon any of these widely held but false views about the accused and wrongly convicted. Or about the criminal justice system in general.

I give you twelve of these questionable myths that might already accept without question. How much do you believe any of these statements?

1. Do you believe that people generally get what they deserve?

   
   

2. Do you believe that all or at least most prisoners claim they're innocent?

   
   

3. Do you believe that high conviction rates contribute to a reduction in crime?

   
   

4. Do you believe that the U.S. has the best judicial system in the world?

   
   

5. Do you believe that wrongful convictions of the innocent rarely occur?

   
   

6. Do you believe that a criminal defendant is more likely to lie than a police officer?

   
   

7. Do you believe that if someone gets arrested, they must have done something wrong?

   
   

8. Do you believe that no one would confess to a crime unless they're guilty in some way?

   
   

9. Do you believe that forensics evidence provides conclusive proof of culpability?

   
   

10. Do you believe that the appeals process will correct any miscarriages of justice?

    
    

11. Do you believe that eyewitness identification of a perpetrator is consistently reliable?

    
    

12. Do you believe that the judge is the most powerful person in the criminal justice system?

The more you believe such falsehoods, and dismiss viable claims of innocence, the more likely you are an “innocence offender”. You become something of a “useful idiot” to those who benefit from such general ignorance of the judicial system’s many imperfections.

Current power structures disincentivize them from alerting you to their failures. They exploit your diminished awareness to hold significant influence over you. They benefit from your naivety for how the adversarial judicial system actually works—or doesn’t work.

The more you accept these widely accepted assumptions, the more they are served at your expense. And at the expense of the innocent.

Want to do something about it? Well, that comes next.

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