IN AMERICA

Lessons From Yosemite

Crime-fighting is not always about justice. Too often when a crime is
committed, the so-called criminal justice professionals feel compelled not
to find out what really happened, but simply to arrest and prosecute
somebody. Anybody.

Frequently the wrong person is arrested. But once a suspect is in custody,
investigators give far more credence to information that might be
incriminating than anything that might indicate the wrong person has been
apprehended. Nobody likes to admit fouling up.

The beheading of a 26-year-old naturalist in Yosemite National Park is as
clear an illustration as you are likely to get of the horrific problems
associated with this tendency of criminal justice officials to rush to
judgment, and their reluctance to admit error. Those who profess to be
tough on crime and are unmoved by the plight of people wrongfully
imprisoned might at least consider that when you lock up the wrong person
the real criminal remains at large.

The mutilated body of Joie Ruth Armstrong was found last Thursday in a
drainage ditch not far from her home in a remote section of Yosemite. This
week the F.B.I. announced that a motel handyman named Cary Stayner had been
arrested and charged with her murder, and that he was also responsible for
the murders in February of a woman and two teen-age girls who were visiting
the park.

This was a curious and unsettling development because the F.B.I. had been
insisting for many weeks that the people responsible for the three February
murders were already in custody. There were reports that one of the men
being held had confessed and that incriminating fiber evidence had been found.

As late as last Friday, F.B.I. officials were saying they did not think the
murder of Ms. Armstrong was linked to the February murders. Cary Stayner
had been routinely questioned about the earlier case but F.B.I. officials
sent him on his way. Their sights were set elsewhere. What is dangerous is
not the fact that mistakes are being made, but the frequency with which
they are made, and the fact that the simplistic, get-tough approach to law
enforcement that is so prevalent in the U.S. insures that they will
continue to be made.

Americans seldom hear that eyewitness identifications are notoriously
unreliable, that confessions are frequently bogus, that much of the
"scientific" hair and fiber analysis that is so heavily relied upon in
criminal cases is a joke, or that prosecutors in jurisdictions from coast
to coast are building cases on the lying testimony of jailhouse snitches
who would send their own mothers to prison if they could get something in
return.

Catastrophic errors and outright corruption are tainting some of the
nation's most serious criminal cases, including many that carry sentences
of life in prison or death. But most of what we hear about the criminal
justice system are demands that it get even tougher, that more people
should be sent to prison, and more prisoners should be sent to the death
chambers, and fewer prisoners should be freed for any reason.

On Tuesday a prominent New Jersey prosecutor, Patricia Hurt, was stripped
of her powers by the Governor, Christine Todd Whitman. Ms. Hurt was caught
up in a scandal that involved, among other things, the refusal for six days
to check the alibi of an innocent man who was arrested and accused of
murdering a police officer in Orange. (Another innocent man picked up in
the same case died in police custody.)

But Ms. Hurt would never have been brought down solely for that flagrant
miscarriage of justice. Trust me. She was also accused of mishandling her
department's budget, of misusing drug forfeiture money and using office
employees for personal chores.

It was the alleged misuse of funds, the lavish spending, that caused her
downfall. The fact that she was willing to look the other way while a
patently innocent man, Terrance Everett, was kept in custody for nearly a
week -- a week in which the real cop killer remained on the loose -- would
never have forced her from power.

The enormous array of abuses within the criminal justice system is a
horribly festering sore, and nobody wants to peel off the scab. I can
understand that. The reality is awful, much worse than a handful of murders
in Yosemite.