what happens when the system fails?

this morning in my capital punishment class, we had a guest speaker. it was a man who was sentenced to death for the murder of a woman in an arizona bar. he spent ten years in prison, was convicted twice in separate trials, did everything the way he was supposed to, and yet it still took ten years and what amounted to a freak occurrence before the system finally recognized that he was innocent.

i was riveted while this man was speaking. he's just a regular guy. he was a mailman before he was wrongfully imprisoned. his only connection to the woman who was murdered was that he played softball for a team that was sponsored by the bar where the woman worked. they were casual acquaintances at best. there was no evidence connecting him with the crime. and yet two separate juries decided he was guilty of her murder.

i'm in law school, i'm entering this profession in part because i believe in the system that it embodies. i have faith that justice will be served. i trust that good will truimph over evil. but the simple fact is that sometimes this just isn't true. so what do i do with this? what do we do with the ray krones? the folks who do NOTHING wrong but who end up spending years in prison, being treated like animals, assumed guilty before they're convicted?

presumption of innocence? not in reality. don't we assume, on some level, that even if you're only in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that's what gets you arrested, there is still something that you've done wrong that warrants the arrest?

ray krone said something in particular that has stuck with me. he was first sentenced to death and spent several years on death row. but he was given a second trial, which resulted in a life sentence. but he said that life in prison is as good as death -- you know you're going to die there. you may have a little less solitary confinement, but you're not getting out. ever. you don't get to look forward to any normal enjoyment of the world. and i guess in this way, maybe the folks who are sentenced to be executed have it easier than those who are thrown in prison for life. maybe it's preferable to make your peace with death, to think of yourself as dead already, than to just wait out your life with nowhere to go.

fucked up. it's so so so backwards. i want to fix it. i want prisoners to be rehabilitated, to whatever extent possible. this out-of-sight-out-of-mind bullshit doesn't do any good for ANYBODY. look what we've got for it -- gang violence in prison, rampant prison racism, ignorant prison guards who use brute force first and ask questions later, and for those who do eventually get out, they're re-entering a world that doesn't want or know what to do with them.
call me a bleeding heart, but it seems that a society that treats its dregs with that much disrespect and that little faith is one that is by definition inhumane, in the lowest-common-denominator sense. if we can't find anything redeemable in the worst of the worst, where does that leave us? what does that say about what we're capable of?