(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . True Crime Podcasts Show Our Police, Prosecutors, Judges, Juries Are Often Incompetent & Corrupt [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-01-28 Let’s face it—the American “criminal justice” system is a poorly-designed, almost totally dysfunctional mess that needs major, immediate overhaul. That fact is clear almost every time I listen to a quality true crime podcast. Our system’s faults are foundational and obvious: Police officers aren’t professionally vetted, trained, certified, monitored, licensed, held accountable. Police and prosecutors are often glaringly lazy, incompetent, unprofessional and in some cases…they’re corrupt criminals themselves. Judges aren’t properly trained, monitored or held accountable. Juries are often comprised of people who don’t have the intellectual capacity or desire to discern fact from fiction or to make decisions based on complex evidence and testimony. Many people lie to get on juries and enact a personal, political agenda while serving. Our system’s adversarial Kabuki theater is itself corrupt. This theatre often devolves to a situation in which defense attorneys lie, distort facts, and do other bad things to defend their clients, while prosecutors and police use the same tactics to condemn their clients. Sentencing and parole stipulations for horrific crimes such as murder, rape, other sexual assault, violence against women and children, child molestation is usually too lenient, allowing dangerous offenders to repeatedly reenter society and do more harm. Out of the hundreds of true crime podcasters, only a few are truly delivering quality journalism. In many cases, the podcasters are investigators doing the job police and prosecutors should have done. Podcasters and journalists often SOLVE crimes the police could easily have solved, if police were intelligent, professional, dedicated public servants. And in some cases, the level of dystopic dysfunction and corruption in our justice system is almost beyond imagination. Without doing a total spoiler reveal, I’ll briefly synopsize a few podcast investigations that highlight the pervasive failure of our justice system. The first is Bone Valley, a multi-part podcast investigating the sad case of Leo Schofield. Leo is trapped in a Florida prison, serving a life sentence, because a jury convicted him of murdering his wife Michelle in 1987. There was zero physical evidence linking Leo to the crime, and multiple other suspects. A corrupt prosecutor ignored all the other suspects, created a false case, and a dumbass jury convicted Leo. For more than three decades, a compelling body of evidence has emerged, including the absolutely credible confession of another Florida inmate who was convicted of other murders at the time the inmate started telling officials that Leo was innocent. Despite the confession from the actual murderer, clear physical and circumstantial evidence exonerating Leo, numerous appeals, retrials and other actions that should have liberated Leo from prison, the state of Florida refuses to release Leo, and there doesn’t appear to be any judicial remedies left to try. Unless a miracle happens, Leo Schofield will spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he did not commit. The man who did commit the crime will go unpunished for it, even though he has repeatedly begged authorities to take his confession seriously…but was ignored. A similarly atrocious case of official misconduct and incompetence is revealed in the Suspect Season Two podcast that investigates the murder of 12-year-old Jonelle Matthews in 1984. In this case, a crazy loser named Steve Pankey exhibited obvious signs of guilt early on. Then his guilty conscience got the better of him. He contacted law enforcement and the media for decades, saying he’d explain what happened to Jonelle if he was given a plea deal including immunity from prosecution. Police and prosecutors in several states ignored Pankey’s near-confessions for decades, until a new team of cold-case detectives revisited the case three years ago. The first Pankey trial ended in a hung jury mistrial. The second resulted in a murder and kidnapping conviction for Pankey, but his sentence allows him to get out on parole as soon as 20 years from now. The possibility of eventual freedom for Pankey outrages Jonelle’s family and friends, who believe a monster who stole the life of a 12-year-old girl should have his life taken too. But Colorado abolished its death penalty in 2020. So the murderer will live at taxpayer’s expense for 20 years, and perhaps be freed to walk the streets again and murder another innocent little girl someday. Sad thing is, this is a COMMON situation, even in the most egregious murder cases. This was illustrated yet again by a case reported on what is the overall best overall weekly true crime podcast: True Crime All the Time. Narrated by an affable, comical, engaging host duo, this podcast has hundreds of episodes documenting how police, prosecutors, judges and juries drop the ball and allow violent people to escape sufficient or any accountability for their crimes. The case of T. Eugene Thompson, a lawyer who hired a hit man to kill his wife (the mother of his four children) in 1963 is a perfect example. Thompson organized the murder so he could collect large life insurance payouts. He lied in his own defense, but was convicted of murder and given a life sentence in late 1963. But in America, a life sentence is NOT really a life sentence. Thompson the murderer only served 20 years in prison and was released in 1983. He was unrepentant and arrogant about the murder, and lived to be 88 years old. Another case in which podcasters did the job our justice system is supposed to do is the podcast White Lies. The podcasters investigated the cold-case killing of white Unitarian minister James Reeb in Selma, Alabama in 1965 at the height of the civil rights movement. Reeb traveled to Selma from his home in Boston to help black Americans get voting rights and other rights denied them by the white supremacist power structure. He and two other ministers were cornered and beaten by redneck racists. Reeb later died from his injuries. Suspects were indicted and put on trial, but as was common in the Confederate South then and now, the indicted men were acquitted by an all-white jury. This highlights one of the worst flaws in the American justice system: relying on a “jury of your peers.” In the Reeb case, the racist power structure of Selma’s police, courts and white culture ensured no white men would ever be held accountable. The judge, jury, police, witnesses were all complicit in making it so that the killers of civil rights advocates would not be punished. After all, the powerful white people in Selma hated black people and any white person who tried to help black people. The White Lies podcasters uncovered the truth, but the system has yet to punish the guilty. Other than serialized, long-form investigatory podcasts, the only true crime podcasts intelligent and entertaining enough for me to recommend are the aforementioned True Crime All the Time, along with True Crime Garage, and Casefile. All three are very good, but True Crime All the Time has a special element of interest involving the chemistry between the hosts (think quirky bromance) that makes it the best, in my opinion. The bottom line is that at every level, the American justice system is like a car that still runs sometimes, but often breaks down, sometimes is catastrophically dangerous, can’t be fixed. To extend the analogy, this car model has foundational design flaws and should never have been sold. Instead of band-aid approaches, America’s current way of handling crime and punishment needs to be replaced with something far more fair, more focused on getting justice for victims and protecting society from dangerous people. Justice is supposed to be blind, according to the old saying and the statue in the article photo, but not so blind that it fails to see the truth. 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