Police State

Ohio men freed for wrongful conviction after 39 years.

"The Ohio Innocence Project at the University of Cincinnati College of Law took Ricky's case several years ago, after the Cleveland Scene published an article calling into question the convictions. The big break came, however, when Ed Vernon, now in his 50s, was in the hospital and, when visited by his pastor, broke down and confessed that he had not seen anything. In fact, he had been on a school bus blocks away and had only heard the shots, but had made up the entire story under police pressure. He told his pastor that living with the lie had been a cloud over his life. His pastor then told him that he had to come forward and correct this injustice.
On Monday and Tuesday, in powerful courtroom testimony, Ed Vernon, choking back tears, explained that at first he believed, in his 12-year old mind, that he was "doing the right thing" by making up the story to help police solve the crime. But his mother knew he was lying, and told him that when the police called him downtown to identify the suspects in a line-up, he should refuse to identify them, and "that would be the end of it." He did as his mother told him, but the detectives would not accept his recantation. Detectives took him into a room and screamed at him, threw objects around the room, and told the crying 12-year old that his parents would be sent to prison for perjury if he didn't change his story. They got him to sign a statement implicating the suspects with details about the murder that they fed to him, and had him claim in the statement that he didn't identify the suspects in the line-up because he too scared."

This is the norm in the US. The officers who pressured him into lying will never be punished. Naturally prosecutors fought this act of justice.

"Jackson, who steadfastly refused to entertain a deal on Monday at the start of the hearing to admit guilt in exchange for being released from his life sentence immediately, walked free this morning with all charges dropped and his name cleared once and for all."

That shows how evil prosecutors are. They offer deals the devil would envy.

More about NSA's supposed internal debates about spying on everybody every minute of every day.  Even if this is true, it's propaganda. It doesn't matter.

Sharyl Attkisson's book, from a former CBS top correspondent targeted by Obama, describes how the real police state operates in practice, not just theory.