The Daily Beast's take on Hurst's 'Wurst slicing bill is the best i've read so far.

The Daily Beast makes a few valid points, especially regarding wrongful convictions.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/03/04/alabama-lawmaker-wants-sex-offenders-to-pay-for-their-own-castration.html

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
03.04.16 3:40 PM ET
By: Brandy Zadrozny
Alabama Lawmaker Wants Sex Offenders To Pay For Their Own Castration

Only one small problem—Alabama has wrongfully convicted at least nine men of the kind of sex offenses that would qualify for this lawmaker’s bill.

An Alabama lawmaker known for parading around on a giant gun-shaped barbecue grill has once again taken up his pet project: the surgical castration of sex offenders.

“This bill would provide that any person over the age of 21 years who is convicted of certain sex offenses against a child 12 years of age or younger would be surgically castrated before his or her release from the custody of the Department of Corrections,” HB 365 reads. “This bill would require that the cost of the procedure be paid by the adult criminal sex offender.”

The point of such a bill is clear. The sexual abuse of a young child is horrific, and who wouldn’t want to prevent a repeated attack?

But castration—whether by surgically removing a man’s testicles or chemically diminishing his libido with injections of synthetic female hormone Depo-Provera—has never been proven as an effective means to curb such violent sexual abuse. Despite popular belief, neither forms of castration are guaranteed to cause impotence. Up to 10 percent of surgically castrated men are able to regain sexual function after the procedure.

What’s more, sexual abuse experts say a one-cut-fixes-all strategy does nothing to address the underlying disorder that leads an abuser to commit such a heinous crime. Still, at least seven states have some law on the books for the chemical castration of sex offenders, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“It’s naive to think this is a panacea,” Dr. Fred Berlin, founder of The Johns Hopkins Sexual Disorders Clinic, told The Washington Post decades ago, a position he has maintained every subsequent time a reporter has called asking for his opinion on the matter. Not only is it wrong to use a medical treatment as punishment, he has said, but there’s no reason to believe it will have the intended effect.

And then there’s the problem of wrongful convictions, a thing Alabama knows a bit about.
Since 1989, 476 people wrongfully convicted of sexual assault or child sex abuse have been exonerated across the U.S., according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project run by the University of Michigan. Nine of those have come from Alabama.

Antonio Williams spent over four years in an Alabama prison serving a life sentence for the rape of a 7-year-old girl, who was interviewed by investigators after it was discovered she had contracted a sexually transmitted disease. Williams was vindicated in 2011 after the girl told a social worker a different man—not Williams—had raped her, but threatened to hurt her if she said anything.

In 2006, 24-year-old Birmingham man Zachary Noah Smith denied, but was ultimately convicted of, sexually molesting his 3-year-old daughter. Six years later, his daughter came forward and told a counselor that no abuse had occurred, but that she had been pressured to lie by her great-grandmother. Smith’s conviction was reversed by a new trial.

Convictions can be reversed, surgical castration cannot.

Luckily, Hurst’s castration bill is unlikely to see the light of day, as similar bills proposed in previous sessions died in committee.

In 2013, Hurst told a local paper, The Anniston Star, “I’ll introduce it every year until it gets passed.”
An email requesting comment was not returned and no one answered Hurst’s phone.

Hurst was elected to Alabama’s House of Representatives in 1998 as a Democrat (he switched parties in 2010). He is also the owner of a Talladega pawn and gun shop, and has sponsored legislation including a successful “Stand Your Ground” bill in 2006 that codified a gun owner’s right to shoot almost anyone, and a bill that would require public school students to read the Congressional Record (with the prayer) for 15 minutes each day.

Alabama ranks 14th in false sex crime convictions

If you go by PER CAPITA (number of false convictions per 1000), Alabama actually ranks 10TH. A new exoneration registry spotlights a number of false convictions, with 80%+ the result of faulty "eyewitness testimony." I'm willing to bet many are also the result of prosecutorial misconduct, more than the 1/3 of cases known to be the result of official misconduct. Yet Alabama denies this is a serious problem.

http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/05/exoneration_lists_exposes_caus.html


Exoneration lists expose causes for wrong convictions in Jefferson County and across nation
Published: Sunday, May 20, 2012, 10:30 AM 




Five men from Jefferson County and 12 others convicted but later cleared in Alabama courts are listed on a new national exoneration registry designed to highlight the issue of wrongful convictions and explain why they happen.


The registry, compiled by the University of Michigan Law School and the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, profiles 873 cases from January 1989 through February 2012. The registry will be made available to the public online starting Monday.


Each convicted defendant was later cleared through DNA, confession by the real criminal or other circumstances. Most involved murder and sexual assault cases.


The cases highlight the legal pitfalls that can lead to wrong convictions, said authors of a study based on the registry, Samuel Gross and Michael Shaffer.


"The more we learn about false convictions, the better we'll be at preventing them -- or if that fails, finding and correcting them as best we can after the fact," Gross said in a statement.


The study found that bad eyewitness testimony was a factor in 94 percent of the exonerations, either because a person mistakenly identified the defendant or lied to put him behind bars.


Alabama, with one federal and 16 state exonerations on the registry, ranked 14th nationally for total false convictions. Broken down per capita, Alabama ranked 10th nationally, according to the report.
But the study's authors said the numbers can be misleading, because states like Alabama, Illinois and Michigan with larger Death Row populations and organizations dedicated to ferret out wrongly-convicted people will be disproportionately represented.


Also, cases such as homicide and sexual assault, which often involve DNA evidence and result in longer sentences, are more likely to provide the means and time needed to prove the wrong person was convicted, the study found.


Nearly 6 in 10 of the people on the registry were cleared by DNA. It took an average of 12 years from conviction and 13 years from arrest for them to find justice, the study found.
Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange said he has confidence in the integrity of state criminal proceedings.


"The many safeguards in place provide sufficient opportunity to correct the very few errors that are made," he said in a statement. "Sixteen errors out of tens of thousands of convictions does not indicate a systemic problem but rather supports the high degree of accuracy in our proceedings."


High number


The study's authors concluded the actual number of wrong convictions is much higher.
Gross and Shaffer intentionally defined exoneration narrowly, only listing on the registry cases the authors identified in which a court, prosecutor, or governor found post-conviction evidence of innocence persuasive enough to drop the charge, release the defendant, order a new trial that resulted in acquittal or issue a pardon.


"It is clear that the exonerations we found are the tip of an iceberg," said Gross, a University of Michigan law professor and editor of the registry. "Most people who are falsely convicted are not exonerated; they serve their time or die in prison. And when they are exonerated, a lot of times it happens quietly."
More than 90 percent of the exonerated defendants are male. Half are black.


About 15 percent of the exonerations involved people who confessed to crimes they did not commit. Often these were juveniles or mentally-disabled defendants, the study found.
The study also found the main factors behind wrong convictions varied by crime:


Murder: Perjury or false accusations were found in nearly two-thirds of those exonerations. Official misconduct, from suggestive interview techniques to fabrication of evidence, also was found in more than half of those cases.


Adult sexual assaults: Mistaken witness identification was involved 80 percent of the time, and was especially prevalent when victim and defendant were different races. Nearly 4 in 10 cases also involved false or misleading forensic evidence.


Child sex abuse: The accuser most often made up the crime, the study found. Official misconduct also was found in more than one-third of the cases.


Many child-abuse exonerations stemmed from what the authors called the "hysteria cases" of the 1980s and 1990s. They included prosecutions such as the McMartin Preschool case in California in which several adults were charged with molesting dozens of children in what proved to be false accusations.


Robbery: Mistaken eyewitness identification was found in 80 percent of those exonerations.


Gross and Shaffer said the justice system needs to be more careful that mistakes are not made on the front end, and more open to genuine evidence of innocence post conviction. Alabama's attorney general, however, said the courts provide sufficient safeguards to correct genuine mistakes.


"The courts remain open to considering strong evidence of actual innocence," Strange said. "Oftentimes, post conviction courts are flooded with weak theories of innocence rather than actual evidence supporting innocence."


Jefferson County


Here are the cases of five men convicted in Jefferson County Circuit Court who are listed in a new national registry of exonerations:


Freddie Lee Gaines: Charged in a 1973 double homicide, he was acquitted in one death and convicted in the other. Gaines was released for good behavior after 11 years in prison. Five years later, in 1990, another man confessed to the crimes. Gaines received $1 million in state compensation, but was not pardoned until 2005.


Dale and Ronnie Mahan: Convicted of a 1984 kidnapping and rape, Dale was sentenced in Bessemer to 35 years and Ronnie received life without parole as a habitual offender. They were released after nearly 14 years when testing that was not available before trial showed they did not leave DNA found on the victim. She still maintained she was attacked by two men, but admitted she had sex with a man other than her husband earlier that day.


Louis Griffin: After his arrest on federal racketeering charges, the New York street gang member took credit for a 1992 drug-debt slaying in Birmingham. But when he and another man went on trial in Birmingham in 1997, Griffin said he made it all up to get a lighter sentence in his federal case. Both men were convicted, with Griffin getting a death sentence and the other man a life term. Griffin won a new trial in 2000 and was acquitted in 2001, but went to federal prison for the racketeering case.


Wesley Quick: Charged in the 1995 shooting deaths of two teens near Pinson, his first prosecution ended in mistrial due to juror misconduct. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1997, but won a new trial and was acquitted in 2003. The trial judge then sentenced Quick to 76 years in prison after he pleaded guilty to three burglaries, including one in which the murder weapon was stolen.