IN AMERICA / CRIMINAL JUSTICE BREAKDOWN

The gruesome problems in the criminal justice system that have been
overlooked for so many years are starting to burst into public view, and the
system is breaking down in some parts of the country.

In Los Angeles an enormous scandal is unfolding. Dozens of people are known
to have been framed by the police and some innocent people reportedly were
shot. A criminal probe of the department has uncovered a wide range of
offenses committed by police officers, including drug dealing, tampering
with evidence, witness intimidation, perjury and assault.

The police misconduct has resulted in the reversal of more than 30 criminal
convictions. It is believed that hundreds of other cases have been tainted.
The estimated potential loss from lawsuits against the department and the
city has soared beyond $100 million.

In Illinois, Gov. George Ryan has ordered a temporary halt to executions
because so many innocent people were landing on death row. Mr. Ryan is a
moderate Republican and a supporter of the death penalty. But the criminal
justice system in his state has proved to be both tragic and farcical. Real
killers roamed free while the wrongfully convicted were handed tickets to
eternity. In some cases ignorance and incompetence were the culprits. In
other, more chilling instances, the innocent were deliberately betrayed.

Illinois has exonerated 13 men who had been condemned to death. Across the
country scores of people have had their convictions overturned after being
sentenced to die.

Said Governor Ryan: "I cannot support a system, which, in its
administration, has proven so fraught with error, and has come so close to
the ultimate nightmare, the state's taking of an innocent life."

The Chicago Tribune, in an investigative series on the death penalty in
Illinois, concluded: "Capital punishment in Illinois is so riddled with
faulty evidence, unscrupulous trial tactics and legal incompetence that
justice has been forsaken."

>From coast to coast the criminal justice system is riddled with the horrors
of incompetence and worse. Wrongful executions, trust me, have already
occurred. I wrote a series of columns about David Wayne Spence, who was
executed in Texas in 1997. Mr. Spence was almost certainly innocent. The
detective who investigated the triple murder for which he was executed told
me, "Nothing from the investigation ever led us to any evidence that he was
involved."

Mr. Spence's execution apparently escaped the notice of Gov. George W. Bush,
who was quick to assert on "Meet the Press" yesterday that he was "confident
that every person that has been put to death in Texas under my watch has
been guilty of the crime charged."

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is sponsoring legislation that
would offer some additional protection against wrongful convictions in death
penalty cases, spoke last week about the case of Anthony Porter, who spent
16 years on death row in Illinois.

"Was he cleared by the state?" asked Senator Leahy. "No. He was cleared by a
class of undergraduate journalism students at Northwestern University, who
took on his case as a class project. That got him out."

If the criminal justice system has such a poor track record when it comes to
capital cases, imagine what the situation is like in the cases with much
less at stake. How many thousands of people have been wrongfully convicted?
In how many instances have the real criminals been ignored by the
authorities, and thus allowed to remain free and prey on others?

How many innocent people have been maimed or killed in the name of the law?
Consider the District of Columbia's Metropolitan Police Department, which
killed more people per capita in the 1990's than any other big-city force.
The Washington Post, after an eight-month investigation, said "internal
police files and court records reveal a pattern of reckless and
indicriminate gunplay by officers sent into the streets with inadequate
training and little oversight."

There is an epidemic of police and prosecutorial misconduct and incompetence
in this country. The scandals in Los Angeles and Illinois are festering
sores, symptoms of a complex disease that both threatens and -- to the
extent that we ignore it -- shames us all.