The Constitution Does Not Prohibit False Convictions

There is nothing in the Bill of Rights or our traditions, that stops the state from accidentally using fake evidence to give someone the death penalty. In practice, I do not actually know of any instance where fake evidence was really a good-faith accident. Generally fake evidence is intentional, reckless, or a result of some political interest or bias at the very least causing uncritical selection of evidence. But if the defendant is given due process, there is no perjury, and he has an attorney, then there is nothing in the Constitution to prohibit him being hanged based on accidental false evidence.

The right to an attorney, and an effective attorney, does not provide a right to recourse for fake evidence. The fact that someone would attempt to attack fake evidence through the right to an attorney like in Shinn v. Ramirez, rather than through some sort of due process argument, proves that person knows there is no prohibition on fake evidence in the Constitution. Such efforts in some ways do more damage, by misunderstanding what the Constitution does and doesn’t do. We cannot improve our condition unless we know our condition.

It is understood man is an aggressive killer, and groups of men more so. The Constitution puts limits on how an executive like a king, can just point at people and have them killed. The will of men is still to torture and kill their neighbors. So the design of the Constitution is to limit what men do, not to change their goal. It puts a speed limit on people, but does not tell them where to drive, and cannot predetermine their destination. The Constitution merely circumscribes in various limited ways, but not perfectly, man’s murderous nature.

Laws against murder don’t stop murder. And the Constitution cannot guarantee every murderer will be caught and punished. If a person commits premeditated murder and there is no way to prove it wasn’t an accident, the person gets away with it. Similarly, the nature of the state is to do murder, not justice. The state can “get away with” murder, through the process. There is tons of fake evidence. But the means to stop it are prescribed in the Bill of Rights. If all those fail, there is no guaranteed recourse and there cannot be.

In general, the Constitution must prescribe processes, rather than outcomes. An extreme example, would be if people had a right to an equal income to everybody else. There is no process by which we could discover and measure all incomes, and force an equal result. A real example, is an appeals judge weighs evidence, to decide if judicial errors at trial would have affected the outcome. The appeals judge is not a jury of peers. But it is not possible to have a new jury trial every time some witness misspeaks or there is a small error.

Similarly, it is not possible to create a process to entertain years later, all claims of fake evidence at trial. The Supreme Court ruling is correct, that there is one chance to bring all the resources together, to decide what evidence is real and fake. So while in a theoretical sense it is possible to discover years later that some evidence is fake, there is no practical process that could be guaranteed in the Constitution, such as convening a panel of experts in front of a jury every five years.

Every convict with resources is capable of producing a steady stream of perjury and experts year after year. An example is Crosley Green who got some cops to lie 20 years later about what happened. The Constitution cannot guarantee, and does not consider, a process to guarantee venue to wade through all of it. It is for that reason that the perjury of two cops 20 years later in the Crosley Green case, has to be finagled in under a right to evidence that was withheld at the time of the trial.

The Declaration of Independence claims to be true, but does not claim to seek or produce truth. The Declaration of Independence mentions judiciary powers, not justice itself. The Constitution does not mention truth. The Constitution mentions establishing justice, but by that means establishing a process for justice, specifically courts. The Constitution does not mention false convictions, fake evidence, second trials, anything like that. And nor is there anything but modest limitations on murder by the state, in the Magna Carta Libertatum.

I watched the state let dangerous felons out of prison as a reward for lying in court to give my friend life without parole, for a crime that did not happen. Anybody who does not know or accept this simple truth, begins in a haze. A person who does not know where he is, cannot plot a course to anywhere. It seems that almost every person in the United States, including lawyers and judges, and even Supreme Court Justices, is trapped in the benighted nature of man, and his finite capacity, and his haze of preconceptions. People cannot perfectly understand the world around them, including matters of law.

If we want to stop false convictions or create a right to some kind of relief from them, we would have to vote on it. Most lawyers would rather try to contrive some right against false convictions, using a set of standard tricks. But no such right exists. And people will never vote for this right, because it is the nature of man to like false convictions to cleanse people we find generally undesirable. The Constitution was designed to stand against the nature of man in a great many ways, but directly prohibiting false convictions is not one of them.